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While driving through open country on a lovely May day, this brown bird pops up onto a fence and poses for a time. One might consider passing it by as it is obviously one of those brown sparrowy things.

With this quiz photo, April seems to be setting up as raptorial-thing month in the ABA Photo Quiz. If I remember, perhaps that will continue next year. The color pattern immediately rules out all ABA-Area vulture species and falcon species, including Crested Caracara, leaving us with ...

Driving down the road, you spot what seems an odd-looking bird for one perched on a roadside wire. You stop and get only a one- or two-second view before your presence flushes the bird into the nearby woodlot on private property.

While some may be confounded by this photo quiz, others will nail it immediately. One of the benefits of really looking at birds, really studying them, is the little kernels of knowledge that such scrutiny can impart, items that might, down the road, enable certain ID of a bird seen poorly.

There are at least two features that often distinguish between skilled, experienced birders and others when it comes to large flocks of birds. The first is the understanding that just because many or most of the individuals of a large flock of birds appear to be referable to the same species does not necessarily mean that such an assumption is true for the entire flock.

While some might immediately recognize the species represented here, others may have to work out the ID. That difference is often the primary one between skilled, experienced birders and others. Research on how skilled practitioners of birding has shown that such use a different portion of their brains to identify individuals of species they know well than do birders that do not know the species well or at all.

Quiz photo taken late October.
Ahh, one of those pale, gull things. At least it’s not a member of Larus!
Or is it?

As any of the folks that have conducted migrating-waterbird counts – seawatches – can say, ducks in flight are relatively straightforward to identify. First, there’s flight style, which does a reasonably good job of allowing quick discernment as to whether one is looking at dabblers or divers...

The first response of some quiz-takers might well be, “What a horrible photo, particularly for a quiz photo!” Others, however, may well jump on the correct identification immediately. For those of us that are not accomplished at or comfortable with identification by shape, posture, and behavior, this could certainly provide for a difficult quiz. Those that had the second response posited above would have gotten the ID solely on shape and posture, perhaps aided by behavior.

Back to the quiz bird being in flight. Aren’t you glad last month’s wasn’t?! There’s not much interesting showing this month. The quiz bird looks long- and narrow-winged, which, if accurate, certainly helps rule out some possibilities...

A quick look at this month’s quiz bird’s feet, more specifically how the toes are attached to the foot, should get us into the correct bird order, as the passerine foot is distinctive. Another important, but widely overlooked bird-ID feature is our quiz bird’s...

This time we have a lovely, pristine, perfectly lit, perfectly posed bird that shows all the field marks we need to identify it correctly to species. Did you believe any of that? This month’s quiz bird of a bird photographed in August might confound a number of quiz takers as to which family it belongs, although at least the order should be straightforward.

Not a very good photo this month. Right? While I generally try to have reasonably good photos with the quiz subject in reasonably good focus, birding is not really like that. We do not see most individual birds well, and, at least for those with “good ears,” most birds that we detect are not seen at all.

No surprise. This month’s quiz bird is flying. I think most would agree that it is a bird of prey of some sort. I chose the photo this month to provide an opportunity to make a couple points about taxonomy that some or many birders apparently do not know.

For the second consecutive month, the subject of the quiz photo is easily and quickly identifiable to family and, by most, to genus. However, despite field guides, the ABA-Area members of that genus do not make for quick and straightforward IDs...

Most of us should be able to quickly narrow the number of options to a number requiring only a single digit. The plumage is mostly white, they have black wing tips, and neither the neck nor the legs are particularly long.
Have at it!

This bird is pretty nondescript. It’s brown with a bit of vague streaking below. The bill is thick-based and short and neither the wings nor tail are particularly noteworthy. Not too long, not too short. Not too wide, not too thin. Good, all-purpose wings and tail. Unremarkable.

Where’s the bird? Ah, there it is. This is something of a different quiz photo.
Yes, it is, to make a certain point: One does not necessarily need to see a bird all that well to be able to identify it. However, to do so, one does need to understand plumages and their progression in various species, as well as how those various plumages differ from those of similar species.

I can almost hear it now, a disappointed, frustrated, “Ugh. A gull.” Much more quietly, I can hear, “Hey! A LWHG!”

“LWHG?”

It’s that time of year. The time when raptorphiles head to the mountains, the shores of large lakes, the coastal promontories, the riverine bluffs to watch for southbound raptors. However, with a bit of luck and a lot of scanning the sky, one can encounter raptors in active migration virtually anywhere on land.

A few sparrowy things comprise this month’s quiz, so break out your reading glasses, as we may need to delve into minutiae. I can hear the cheers, now! Everyone loves sparrowy things...

This month we’ve got an apparently small bird flying overhead. Perhaps-important ID clues include the mix of buff and white below, the small bill, and the long primary projection. The final of those characters suggests that our bird is an individual of a species that is either a long-distance migrant or a highly aerial one… or both.

When looking at an unknown shorebird – or, in this case, shorebirds, the first ta