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How to Identify California Song Birds

California is an amazing place for bird watching. The varied terrain and multiple micro-climates (coastal, mountain, old-growth forests, and more) provide habitats for thousands of year-round and migratory species. Perhaps none delight the birder more with their bright colors and beautiful music as the song birds. And in California, there are hundreds of songbirds that can be identified by the tenacious and committed birder. While many songbirds look and sound similarly, the difficulty of finding and distinguishing between different varieties can be aided with a few key tools and techniques.

Instructions

- 1
  Invest in quality field guides. For maximum help in identification, get at least two bird guides: one for the Western region and one for California. Western guides are published by several major names in birding guides, and different birders have their favorites among them: Sibley, Audubon, and Peterson's. There are also a number of State specific guides; one of the more comprehensive is published by National Geographic. Use your field guides to familiarize yourself with the local songbirds and their distinguishing characteristics such as color, habitat (for example, Bay area birds versus Redwood forest birds), and seasonality.
- 2
  Join a guided bird walk. Birding on one's own can be difficult. Local birding groups and organizations often sponsor free and fee-based guided tours. This is great way to learn from an experienced birder about common and rare locals, good birdwatching locales, and essential birding tools. An expert can help you determine whether the black-headed grosbeak you have in your binoculars is a Pacific or a Rocky Mountain variety. Also many guides are able to identify songbirds by their song, which can be extremely helpful to the beginning birder.
- 3
  Listen to bird song recordings. Learning to identify birds from recordings is like trying to learn a language from its dictionary. Birds do not often accommodate the birder with exact replications of the tape. But, recordings are as useful to a birder as a dictionary to the aspiring linguist. Use quality recordings to attune your ear to how different calls sound. Recordings can also be helpful to underscore identifications in the wild: after you have classified a bird outdoors, listen to its song on tape back at home.
- 4
  Pick one bird to study at a time. California has a wonderful variety of birds, so many that the sheer volume of different species can be intimidating. Each week or month, select a bird to focus your studies on. Listen to the bird's song, read up on it's habits, and look for it on your weekly walks. In this way, the differences between birds such as the song sparrow and white-crowned sparrow will become more apparent.

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