cavan wood
Well-known member
This is a piggy-back to Tim Allwood's thread on birding competency, and Brian Robson's, response that a forum such as this should be used to promote the hobby of birding and it's related skills. (hope I've paraphrased effectively).
Assuming that someone wishes to take useful field notes, how would they go about it. Clearly it is important to note and/or sketch colours, wing bars, bill shapes, eye rings, supercilliums, behavious, etc., but I was hoping people could share some of their most useful practices for:
a) orgainizing their notes (ex. what medium? cronological or species? how do you find that note on grey-cheeked thrush you made last year?)
b) balancing the observing versus the note taking (drew that bill perfectly, but I wish I had have spent that time watching what the bird was doing)
c) determining the important features to note (ex. if you're only going to get a few glimpses of the species, should I concentrate on bill shape, behaviour, or relative length of the primaries? This becomes easier of course when you know what you have to compare it to, but what of a relatively new bird? What should we look for first?
d) incorporating photos/digiscopes into our tools for bird study.
e) etc.
Obviously you can't describe everything you do in detail in this forum, but a synopsis would be appreciated.
Scott
Assuming that someone wishes to take useful field notes, how would they go about it. Clearly it is important to note and/or sketch colours, wing bars, bill shapes, eye rings, supercilliums, behavious, etc., but I was hoping people could share some of their most useful practices for:
a) orgainizing their notes (ex. what medium? cronological or species? how do you find that note on grey-cheeked thrush you made last year?)
b) balancing the observing versus the note taking (drew that bill perfectly, but I wish I had have spent that time watching what the bird was doing)
c) determining the important features to note (ex. if you're only going to get a few glimpses of the species, should I concentrate on bill shape, behaviour, or relative length of the primaries? This becomes easier of course when you know what you have to compare it to, but what of a relatively new bird? What should we look for first?
d) incorporating photos/digiscopes into our tools for bird study.
e) etc.
Obviously you can't describe everything you do in detail in this forum, but a synopsis would be appreciated.
Scott