Answering Bird ID Requests on Facebook
Nine Rules to Make it Easier for Everyone
I spend more time than I should on bird-related facebook pages. I do so partly because I hope my bird knowledge might at times be vaguely useful, but also because — as a social scientist by profession — I’m weirdly fascinated by the dynamics of such groups.
On pretty much all birding facebook groups, people often ask for help identifying bird photos. Recently, however, this has become a source of friction and disagreement. There are two main gripes. On the one hand, some complain that ID requests frequently become overwhelmed by responses that are merely “guesses”, and/or not terribly well informed, meaning straightforward ID requests get unnecessarily waylaid by misleading answers. On the other hand, others frequently complain about “experts”, “know it alls” etc, who stand accused of being, variously, elitist, arrogant and condescending in their dealings with less experienced birders.
To be clear: I am not a neutral bystander in all this. I consider myself reasonably expert: I’ve been a very keen birder since 1991, and am pretty confident when it comes to distinguishing, say, Icterine and Melodious Warbler in the field (to give a random example). I have once or twice been accused of being one of the elitist “know it alls” everyone hates (this piece will, I expect, invite similar responses from some, lol), and I myself have also expressed frustration with the sheer of volume of wrong answers that some ID queries receive.
I’m not going to revisit those debates, other than to flag that there is disagreement about how people should respond when ID requests are made. So in the probably vain hope I might be able to cut through this disagreement, I’m going to suggest some rules (or, rather, questions to ask yourself) for how to productively respond to ID queries on birding facebook groups. And even if you’re not on facebook, I hope some of what I say might double up as useful bird identification advice in general. I start from the assumption that people making bird ID requests online ideally want their queries answered clearly, unambiguously and quickly.
- Are you sure of the bird’s identity?
The first question is to ask yourself is if you are absolutely confident the bird is what you think it is. Most bird photos can in fact be identified with a high degree of certainty, so if you’re not sure, the chances are someone else will be. If you are genuinely not sure, then there’s obviously a risk your answer will be wrong. If you are not sure, but really really want to comment, then concede that you are not sure. The problem, of course, arises from people who sincerely believe themselves to be correct, but are still wrong nonetheless. The next few questions, in theory at least, should help to attend to this problem.
2. Are you able to explain — in a reasonable degree of detail — why is it what it is?
Ideally, all answers should have an explanation for why the bird is species X rather than species Y. This allows us to see how a bird was identified, and also allows us to gauge how reliable the identification is. Generally speaking, if someone is willing and able to explain in detail why it is a particular species, the chances are the identification will be correct. Sometimes, this isn’t always possible or practical. But, in my view, people should only respond if they could, in principle, provide specific, concrete reasons (i.e. not vague impressions, imprecise appeals to prior familiarity, or “vibes”). It’s also, I think, incumbent on the commenter to read previous comments. And if their answer goes against the consensus, then we really need some rationale/justification.
3. Are you familiar with the species and similar species?
Only give a response if you are familiar with the species in question. I, for one, would be very very reticent about identifying online a bird I had never myself seen in the field. There really is no substitute for field experience when it comes to generating a capacity for accurate bird identification. Merlin, google searches, or knowledge gleaned from looking at a field guide fall well short of knowledge drawn from in-the-field experience. But it’s clear that people do sometimes authoritatively hold forth about bird species they haven’t seen. This happened just the other day. Someone asked for an ID: the bird in question was a normal female House Sparrow that had acquired a large blob of orange pollen on its fore-crown. Several people weighed in to confidently inform us that this was an “Orange-crowned Sparrow”. But none of these people had any field experience of Orange-crowned Sparrow. Why? Because the species doesn’t exist: it was invented for the purposes of an April Fool’s joke in 2017 after a birder on Arran encountered a similarly be-pollened House Sparrow. And yet, several people passed off this joke as authoritative ornithological knowledge. Leaving aside the worrying implications of this episode for showing how easily online disinformation travels among certain constituencies, it was a salutary lesson in some peoples’ tendency to project confidence about bird ID despite, in this case, there being literally zero accurate knowledge to draw on.
Let me give a further, more prosaic, example. I’ve never seen Semipalmated Sandpiper. I probably should have done, but I haven’t. I’ve seen all closely related species multiple times — Western Sandpiper, Little Stint, Least Sandpiper etc — and I have some knowledge of what “Semi-p Sand” is meant to look like. But I just don’t think it would be appropriate for me to opine on a bird ID forum if someone were asking for views on a potential Semi-p. I would leave it to the judgment of those who do have experience with that species. And ideally the same should apply to all species, irrespective of rarity.
4. Are you aware of possible variations within the species caused by differences in age, sex, seasonal plumages, and normal plumage variation?
This is a common banana skin. A lot of wrong answers arise from people not being fully cognisant of different plumages various species can exhibit. One time, for instance, someone posted a photo of a flock of Sanderlings on a beach in varying stages of moult: some were in non-breeding plumage (so mostly white), others were in breeding plumage (so predominantly rufous), with a few juveniles to boot. One chap confidently weighed in to claim that it was a mixed flock of Dunlin and Sanderling: his mental image of Sanderling was clearly of non-breeding plumaged birds, meaning he mistook the breeding plumaged birds for Dunlin. Similarly, Stonechats are often more variable than people realise. There’s a popular misconception that Whinchat has a supercilium, Stonechat doesn’t. But female and (especially) juvenile Stonechats can often exhibit relatively prominent supercilia, which can mislead the unwary. And when it comes to birds that naturally exhibit a lot of plumage variation — Buzzard for instance — unusually pale or dark individuals often invite confusion. So before wading in, it’s important to ask if you are sure you have considered these possible lines of variation.
5. Are you confident there’s nothing misleading about the photo(s)?
Bird photos can be very misleading. Angle, distance, saturation, shadow, lack of focus etc can all give misleading impressions of what a bird really looks like. Often, disagreements arise from people misconstruing a photographic artefact as a genuine feature of the bird. One amusing example of this occurred a while back when a very well meaning chap posted a pic of a Meadow Pipit with, in his words, “a black head, something never seen before!” It was soon pointed out to him that the bird’s head was merely in shadow, and was not some hitherto unrecorded ornithological phenomenon. Photos of birds in flight can also mislead: often a series of photos is required to get a rounded picture of what a bird really looks like.
6. Are you fixating on one particular feature, or looking at the bird in the round?
This is super important. Good bird identification relies on making judgments based on a combination of features. Fixating unduly on one feature is, very often, the royal road to misidentification. Let me give some examples. People often say — correctly — that the pale cheek spot of Linnet is a key ID feature. But I have seen pics of Twite, Redpoll and juvenile Goldfinch identified as “Linnets” because there was a bit of a hint of a pale cheek spot in the photos (see previous point), despite the birds in question otherwise not resembling Linnet. An even worse situation arose recently where someone posted a photo of a Marsh Harrier with a central tail feather missing. This gave something of an impression that its tail was “forked”. Lots of people, it seems, are of the view that any bird of prey with any hint of a forked tail must be a Red Kite. Despite the fact that, again, the bird was otherwise completely wrong in terms of structure and plumage for Red Kite, I found myself unable to resist the tsunami of people offering variations on “defo Red Kite, check the forked tail”.
7. Are you aware of the likelihood of candidate species in the location the photo was taken?
As I’ve discussed previously, bird identification is often not about absolutes, but about making a judgment of the relative likelihood of a particular species turning up. If there’s a pic of a phylloscopus warbler in a sewage farm in England in December, the chances of it being a Willow Warbler are absolutely tiny (it will most likely be a Chiffchaff of some description, although Dusky, Yellow-browed or indeed Hume’s could perhaps enter the equation). Answers that don’t bear this is mind are unlikely to be very helpful. One time, for instance, someone posted a pic of a ringtail Harrier in winter in — iirc — Suffolk. “Is this a Hen or a Montagu’s?” they asked. It was, as expected, a Hen, but the original question was unintentionally misleading: Montagu’s (rare at the best of times) just does not occur in England in winter. A ringtail harrier in Suffolk in winter would be much much much more likely to be Pallid than Montagu’s but, initially, this wasn’t considered: readers took the question at face value. Also, if the photo was taken outside of the UK, folks should really only comment if they are familiar with the birds of the country in which the photo was taken, so we avoid situations where a Laughing Dove in Morocco gets misIDed as a Turtle Dove or an Eleonora’s Falcon in Mallorca is deemed a Hobby by UK-based birders who reach for the closest UK approximation.
8. Is it a bird of prey?
For reasons I don’t fully understand (I could speculate why, but that’s not what I’m here to do), birds of prey always receive a much higher percentage of wrong answers than other bird families. And more often than not, it involves common birds getting incorrectly “upgraded” to rarer birds: Sparrowhawks become Goshawks, Buzzards become either Honey Buzzards (if in England) or Golden Eagles (if in Scotland). Birds of prey are the only bird group where the volume of misidentification sometimes becomes overwhelming. One such incident occurred recently where a chap posted an ID query of a bird of prey from Stodmarsh in Kent. It was a Black Kite: quite a rare bird in the UK and a very good find. I felt sorry for the guy. Despite me and several other keen birders explaining in detail why it was Black Kite and not Red Kite (or indeed any other candidate species), we were absolutely swamped with people just asserting it was a Red Kite (without any explanation). Although there was no doubt about the identification (the bird was even seen at the site the following day by others), I got the impression that the sheer tsunami of erroneous “Red Kite” comments may well have planted a seed of doubt in the guy’s brain. The point is: I would ask anyone reading this to please, please, take a deep breath before opining on any bird of prey ID request. The people asking the questions in good faith deserve better than the torrents of misinformation they end up receiving.
9. Are you aware of your own limitations?
If you’ve stayed with me until now, this is the part where I expect I might lose a few people. Here’s the deal: bird identification is hard. I have spent 32 years (more than 3/4 of my entire life!) trying to improve as a birder/bird identifier. And I’m still learning all the time. One thing I have learned is that an ability to identify birds reliably and accurately requires two things: field experience, and a degree of technical precision. To be able to distinguish between say, Willow Warbler and Chiffchaff, requires familiarity with both species (which, to be fair, isn’t hard, as they are both common). But you also need to understand things like wing formulae, primary projection, and, ideally, technical aspects of, say, a bird’s head pattern (if I had a pound for every time someone says “eyestripe” when they mean “supercilium”…). Most phylloscopus warblers I see — both in the field and in pics posted online — I can identify reasonably confidently. But some I can’t, and that’s fine, you just gotta let it go.
To put things super-bluntly: I have come to realise that quite a lot of people (absolutely not everyone, but a decent chunk of the wider UK birdwatching community) often massively over-estimate their bird identification prowess. To be clear, before you start throwing your copy of the Observer’s Book of Birds at the screen in a rage: my beef is absolutely not with people who are inexperienced, new to the hobby or, for perfectly understandable reasons, not super-interested in the finer points of bird ID. That’s absolutely fine. The problem is not lack of knowledge per se (obviously everyone will have different levels of birding knowledge), but misplaced over-confidence. Lots of the people, for instance, who insisted that the central-tail-feather-less Marsh Harrier was in fact a Red Kite were absolutely convinced they were right and were wholly unmoved by my talk of moult, primary patches and contrasting lesser coverts. But they clearly did not have either the experience or technical expertise necessary to make the right call. There is — as if it needed saying — nothing wrong with not being able to identify a Marsh Harrier. None of my immediate family could identify a Marsh Harrier even if one were to come into our house and peck them on the bottom. And this, dear reader, is not something I hold against them. But there are some who are similarly unskilled at Marsh Harrier ID but who, unlike my family members, feel emboldened to weigh in on bird of prey ID queries, leaving only confusion and misinformation for the original poster. As such, I think answering bird ID requests should, by and large, be left to those who genuinely have the requisite level of experience and expertise. Folk knowledge (e.g. things learned from your uncle who handed you his beloved pair of wartime binoculars in 1972), half-remembered old field guides, hasty google searches, and using AI platforms such as Merlin can all have their place in modern birding. But that place is not in the comments of bird ID requests on facebook, and these things are no substitute for genuine expertise and experience. People sometimes write into Birdwatch magazine with ID queries, with the reasonable expectation they will get an expert response. I don’t see why facebook groups should be any different.
Listen, pals, I know this is an unfashionable argument to make, and some of you might well be seething. In this post-Brexit age where we’ve all “had enough of experts”, some will likely dismiss what I’ve said as another example of precisely the kind of arrogance and elitism from keen birders that need to be expunged from the hobby. And I know that to play the role of an “expert” is often to be a killjoy, denying folk the pleasure of blissful ignorance. My favourite example of this was the time I solemnly informed a chap that his “Golden Eagle” in Scotland was in fact a Buzzard. He made no attempt to hide his ire, almost as if I had somehow used black magic to turn his “Golden Eagle” into a Buzzard.
But, truth be told, what I have written comes from a place of genuinely wanting to help the question-askers as accurately and efficiently as possible. It helps no one if, as often happens now, their questions are met with often misleading responses from people who would do well to be a little more circumspect about wading in. Bird identification is often hard: it requires a pretty high level of experience and expertise to consistently do it well. That’s fine, and I think we should all be honest about that.
