If you’re interested in birding, but you’re not sure where to start, I’d recommend that you get actually good at looking at birds. I mean looking at the key features of a bird, that distinguish them from other birds. You can have an excellent field guide, and a clear look at an unfamiliar bird, but if you’re not sure what to look for, you can mis-identify quite easily.

Guideline 1: Take in the Whole Bird — The white brow of a female red-breasted grosbeak, for instance, is shared by the Carolina wren; if all you were taking note of in a new bird is its brow, you really wouldn’t have enough to go on.

The first thing you should try to figure out is what general sort of bird you’re looking at. Some species are instantly recognizable, but most aren’t so easy, so before you try to figure out a species, try to figure out what broader category of bird it is. If it’s a swimming bird, is it a duck? a goose? a loon? a merganser? something else? If it’s a large bird perched in a tree, is it a raptor or some sort of crow? You might not be able to tell this right away, but it’s where you should start.

This is especially tricky, yet especially key, in identifying songbirds. Half of all birds are members of the order Passeriformes, whose name means “sparrow-shaped”. Passerine birds are often called “songbirds” or “perching birds”, and they all have generally similar bodies relative to other, more exotic sorts of birds like ostriches, penguins, and woodpeckers. Once you’ve identified a passerine (or likely passerine) you’ll want to try to get a bit more specific. Size and silhouette matter here. Wrens, for instance, are rather small, have egg-shaped bodies, long slim beaks, and long tails that they hold cocked up. Sparrows look similar but are less round, have shorter, stouter beaks, and shorter tails which are generally held straight. Just from silhouette you can tell a wren from a sparrow.

In flying birds, wing shape can be key. Falcons and hawks look and behave similarly, but falcons have pointed wings, while hawks have rounded wings; eagles, furthermore, can often be identified by long finger-like feathers extending from the ends of their wings.

Guideline 2: Scan the Field Marks — The author Roger Tory Peterson, who wrote one of the first modern birding guides, introduced the idea of “field marks”. These are the obvious, diagnostic marks that can be noted in the field when trying to identify a bird. The aforementioned white brows are an example, but there are others. Once you’ve figured out the general sort of bird you’re looking at, scan over the field marks, which can help you identify a particular species. In my ID tips within this birding log, I call out the field marks I look for to identify a species. Understanding field marks requires understanding the parts of a bird.

In South America, there’s a little bird called the multi-colored rush tyrant, which is useful for illustrating field marks because it has a lot of different colors on different body parts. Looking at its head, we see several discrete patches of color. It has a striped crown; the crown is the top part of a bird’s head (especially the central part of it). The crown might also be called the “cap” (as in the black-capped chickadee) especially if the entire top-side of the head is of a single color. More rarely the crown, particularly the forward part of it, is called the “poll” (as in the black-polled warbler or the redpolls)

The yellow stripes over its eyes look a bit like brows, and might be referred to as such, although strictly speaking, in birds brows touch the top of the eye. An eye-stripe is a mark running back from the eye, rather than over it. An eye-ring is a mark running around the eye; these can be unbroken (completely circling the eye) or broken (having gaps), and they can be bold or thin. In many cases, similar species are best distinguished by looking at the eye-stripe or eye-ring.

Looking back at the rush tyrant, we see the sides of its head are blue. The feathers in front of the eye are the lores, while the feathers behind the eye are the auriculares and/or the cheeks (the two terms aren’t quite synonymous, as the cheeks are lower, generally). The feathers behind and below the beak are the throat. The rush tyrant has a white upper throat that quickly turns yellow to match the breast. Some birds have throats that match the breast, while others have distinct throats; a chickadee, for example, has a black throat but a pale breast. The back of the head is the nape; in the case of the rush tyrant, the nape is green. Some birds, most notably falcons, have malar stripes, which run vertically down their faces, rather than running back.

The underparts of a bird include the throat along with the breast, belly, sides, and vent. The breast is roughly the front half of a bird’s underside; in swimming birds, the breast is the forward part that sits in the water. The belly is the area back from the breast, running between the legs; often it is paler than the breast (as is the case in the rush tyrant). The sides are the parts under and just below the wings. The vent is the underside base of the tail; in the rush-tyrant, the vent is a conspicuous red.

The upperparts of a bird include the crown and nape as well as the back, wing coverts, wings, and rump. The back is self-explanatory; often when perched the wings are folded over much of the back. The wing coverts are the bird’s “shoulders”, the part of a folded wing that generally blends into the back (though not always, as in the red-winged blackbird). The rump is the upperside base of the tail, often visible between folded wings. The wings, when perched, are generally only visible as long flight feathers running back from the coverts. In flight, wings are more fully visible. Different birds may have different markings on the wings; especially diagnostic are wing-bars and the speculum. Wing-bars are bands of differently-colored feathers running across the upper-middle of the wings. They can be broad or thin, single or doubled. The rush-tyrant has single, broad white wing-bars. A speculum is a distinct patch of feathers in the inner trailing edge of the wing; speculums are mostly associated with ducks, where they are often diagnostic. For instance, a female mallard has a blue speculum with a white edge, where the similar black duck has an all-blue speculum and the similar gadwall has an all-white speculum. Some parrots also have a distinct speculum.

Bird’s tails can be anywhere from almost invisibly short to many times longer than the rest of the bird’s body. Tails can take many shapes: the long plumes of a pheasant, the short fan of a duck, the long, slim blade of a wren, the folded keel of a grackle, the stiff brace of a woodpecker. When looking at an unfamiliar bird, pay attention to the tail.

Many birds will look different depending on age, season, and gender. Be sure you aren’t only familiar with the appearance of a species’ breeding males.

Guideline 3: Location Matters (Usually) — When you’re seeing an unfamiliar bird, pay attention to where it is. Obviously, birds have geographic ranges; if you see a black-and-white bird swimming in the North Atlantic, it’s not going to be a penguin, but an auk. But even beyond that, pay attention to where the bird is. A little brown bird seen in a city is probably a house sparrow, but deep in the woods, it’s probably not. A gull eating fries dropped in a parking lot is probably a ring-billed gull, but a gull at the beach might be another species. Loons are only going to swim in large lakes, while green-winged teals will be found in shallow muddy ponds. Some birds hide in underbrush thickets, others life in the forest canopy.

Range and habitat can be useful in identifying birds, but remember, most birds can fly, and all birds are fairly mobile. There’s no rule that says a swamp sparrow can’t leave the swamp, that’s just typically where they’re found. Birds will show up in weird locations, especially during migration. Birds will also wander from their usual ranges, especially young birds; the Great Lakes region has seen, in recent years, many tropical wading birds usually confined to the Gulf Coast such as spoonbills, limpkins, and flamingos, come up for the summer. The Canadian Maritimes is now home to a Steller’s sea eagle that traveled from its kind’s usual home in northeastern Asia through Texas and up to where it seems content to live out its days. The past hundred years have seen cattle egrets expand from Africa and Asia into the Americas and Australia. Sometimes species can be introduced to new areas by people, either tagging along or being imported deliberately. Common non-native species will generally be included in local field guides, but other exotics might be found very locally; the monk parakeets of New York City and the European goldfinches of Chicagoland are two prominent American examples.

All this is to say that location is a good hint, but not a conclusive factor, in identifying a bird. Pay attention to where you saw a bird, but if you got a good look at a bird that doesn’t look like a local, don’t disbelieve your eyes.

One more note on location. If you see a strange bird of a type commonly domesticated (pigeons and ducks being the most common American examples), it might be either an escapee or a hybrid between escapees and wild birds. Some wild species will also hybridize where their ranges overlap, such as the Steller’s and blue jays, or the indigo and lazuli buntings. You probably shouldn’t always assume your bird is a unique hybrid, but sometimes that’s the most sensible ID.