Practice Birding Skills With eBird's Quizzes

A new year - a new decade, even - is upon us!  Perhaps a New Year's resolution of yours is to be more active outdoors this year, to walk more, to travel, or to learn something new.  If so, birding might be just the thing for you!  (If you have no idea what birding is or why it's so great check out my list of the many joys and benefits of birding.)

Whether you are brand new to birding or a seasoned pro, we can always learn new things and improve our skills.  This year, I have a few birding goals in mind, along with plans I'd like to implement in order to improve.  (Seabirds, for example, are a group of birds I plan to work on!)  So, each month throughout 2020, as I learn and develop my birding, I will offer a tip for how you too can become a better birder, naturalist, and citizen scientist. 

January in Central California tends to be foggy and cold, with stretches of dreary and dismal gray days punctuated by spells of bright sunshine and biting wind.  Even so, the weather is comparatively mild compared to most of the country, and winter is in fact an excellent time, possibly the best time, for birding in the Great Central Valley.

However, there will probably be days when short hours of daylight, cold fog, and winds that sting the eyes and numb the fingers may keep us indoors (only very occasionally, of course!)

On these days, we still have opportunities to improve our birding skills!  Watching birds at the backyard feeder is an option, as is paging through a favorite field guide or perusing eBird and planning spring birding trips.  But lately, I've been taking advantage of eBird's photo quizzes to practice birding even when I can't get out into the field.

eBird's photo and sound quizzes are fun, educational, and beneficial to science.  While you're gaining skills and rising to meet identification challenges, you're helping eBird sort through thousands upon thousands of user-submitted photos by rating the quality of the photos.

I like this feature a lot, because many of the photos submitted are, shall we say, less than great.  Birds in these photos are often far away, blurry, in flight, in shadow, or just in weird positions, which represents how we frequently see them in the field.  Rarely are birds in the field sitting still, posed perfectly in ideal light, just like in their pictures in the field guide.  More commonly the bird is flying away or ducking out of sight, obstructed by branches, just a little too far away, or poorly lit.  And that is exactly what is represented by the assortment of photos submitted to eBird!

This is where the photo quizzes really shine.  If you can practice identifying crummy photos of birds, you'll be even better equipped to make an identification from a crummy look at a bird in the field!  (Even then, it's often easier to make an ID in the field, where you have sound and behavior as additional clues.)

But of course, plenty of the photos are of high quality, giving even beginners a chance to practice ID skills.  Don't worry if you get some wrong - it's all for your own fun and education; the rating you give each photo is what counts for eBird anyway.

To start a quiz, follow this link.  Take a minute to read the guidelines at the bottom of the page that explain how to rate and tag photos.  Then click "Start Quiz."  (You will need to sign in or create a free account with eBird, which if you haven't done already, I highly recommend!)

The next page allows you to customize your quiz, selecting the region and time of year you would like to be quizzed on.  This can be really specific (such as birds seen on a particular day at a specific spot) or broad (year round, across all of North America).  I suggest starting with your own town or county to study up on familiar birds, or you may want to practice new birds in a place you're unfamiliar with.

Some photos will be top quality, field guide-worthy photos: in-focus, well-lit, showcasing all the right field marks, like this photo of a Black-footed Albatross.

Some will be challenging, but representative of what you're likely to see through binoculars or a scope when field birding (or in this case, seawatching), like this photo of Short-tailed Shearwaters in flight.

And some photos will be more or less impossible, like this one of a distant, blurry Cassin's Auklet.

Don't let crummy weather keep you from birding!  Give eBird's photo (and sound!) quizzes a try this winter and practice your birding skills from the warmth of your own home, while still contributing to science.