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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I do a bit of wildlife photography in my spare time (follow me on Insta for pictures of British birds and occasionally my cat - https://instagram.com/onion4k). Recognising birds is surprisingly hard. A lot of them have very subtle differences that can't be spotted easily. For example, telling the difference between a common Thrush[1] and a much less common Redwing[2] is a real challenge. It's a fun and challenging problem to train yourself to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_thrush#/media/File:Turdus... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwing#/media/File:Redwing_Tu...

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Offf, as some one coming from the UK, thrush vs redwing is not even in the difficult category... Try little brown birds of which there are many, they are basically indistinguishable, they love to hide, so notorious they even get their own wikipedia page[1]; or gulls, also many species, as well as several variations of adolescent plumage; or raptors which in the UK you pretty only see as a silhouette while they are hundreds of feet up in the air, and seen so rarely you never learn to distinguish them by their outline.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_brown_bird

Raptors are really interesting from a recognition perspective. Since volunteering at the Hawk Conservation Trust in the UK I've learnt lots of useful tips that apply even when you can just see a little silhouette. For example:

- Falcons have relatively scythe-shaped wings while Hawks have more rounded wings relative to Falcons

- Hawks and Eagles have more pronounced 'fingers' at the ends of their wings relative to Falcons

- Buzzards and Kites: Buzzards are more stubby and have a diamond shaped tail; Kites have longer wings and a forked tail

- There are similar differences with respect to the length of the tail.

Some raptors have diagnostic flight patterns: Kestrels hover in place, Kites perform extremely dynamic acrobatics, especially in groups. Even when you can see the plumage, it doesn't always help - there can be significant differences between juveniles and adult males and females.

Up here in the North East near Sunderland we get a lot of Red Kites so I've learned to recognise them fairly well. Very hard to get a good picture though.

I spotted a Kestrel in a tree a couple of weekends back, that sat for a while and then dived to try to catch a small bird. It missed but it was great to watch. I managed to get a few decent photos - https://www.instagram.com/p/CHDt2HogIZj/?igshid=1n13m6e6a6e1...

This reminds me of a parallel expresssion in mycology:

> "Little brown mushrooms" (or LBMs) refers to a large number of small, dull-coloured agaric species, with few macromorphological uniquely distinguishing characteristics.

> As a result, LBMs typically range from difficult to impossible for mushroom hunters to identify.

> For mycologists, LBMs are the equivalent of LBJs ("little brown jobs") and DYCs ("damned yellow composites") that are the bane of ornithologists and botanists, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_hunting#Little_brown_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damned_yellow_composite

Yes, some species are very hard to tell apart by eye. If you learn their songs it can become easier. Other hard-to-tell-apart species are Marsh tit and Willow tit. I am not confident after close to 10 years with birding interest.

If you can find a copy of it, read the paper titled "Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition". A great read with some lovely anecdotes about botany and birding. One that I fondly remember is a description of how someone is able to recognize a particular bird when it's just a distant silhouette. "It flies like a sack of potatoes".

Possibly-related, I wrote much of my undergraduate thesis on how experts (or rather, just people with lots of experience in a field) see or hear differences where non-experts see none.

To a regular person, the cloaca of male and female baby chicks look identical, but to a chicken sexer who sorts hundreds of baby chicks a day, they look totally different, even if the person can't describe exactly how. To expert radiologists, a shadow in an x-ray is almost certainly cancer, while a non-expert can't see any shadow at all.

Similarly, and more mundanely, in languages where there isn't a strong meaningful distinction between two sounds, speakers have trouble discerning them. To a monolingual native Japanese person, /r/ and /l/ sound almost identical, while a native English speaker can't understand how they don't hear the difference. To a French person, the "oo" sounds in au dessus (on top) and au dessous (underneath) sound completely different, yet to an English person they are almost indistinguishable.

These are really the same phenomena, and why an expert bird watcher would have no trouble recognizing the "sack of potatoes" flight of a bird.

I have been birding for several years and it is amazing how repeated attempts day after day train your mind to recognize these subtle differences.

But actually it is true that there are a few pairs of species that cannot reliably be distinguished visually and you need to hear their calls.

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