(This is the fourth post in a 5 part series especially geared for participants in the Young Birder of the Year contest. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. –ed.)
by Steve N. G. Howell
Fact: Careful observations and sketches help you really learn birds. What color legs does a Kentish Plover have? Well, the field guides in the 1970s and 1980s would say black or gray, but my notes said “dark gray-blue legs and feet, almost appearing dark pinkish gray or greenish gray against different backgrounds and in varying lights” (Image 4a). Do I trust my eyes during an hour of observation, or the field guide? My eyes for sure. And by careful observation I got to see where the guides were not always accurate, or perhaps didn’t have space to convey the variation inherent in any species.

Image 4a. Kentish Plover, the first Gwent County record (South Wales, UK) and my lifer, which I found on 21 April 1978. I spent an hour watching and sketching this bird, and it was pretty exciting! Better than snapping a few pictures and moving on after a few minutes.
I also did more traveling at this time, to other parts of the UK, including ‘twitches’ (trips to chase an individual rare bird). My notes on the bird in the front of the notebook weren’t much to look at: Location, date, species and number/age/sex, but usually I spent one to three hours watching the bird and writing a description, making sketches, etc. (Image 04b). It’s fun to look back now and see my descriptions and sketches of my first Belted Kingfisher (about the size of Green Woodpecker and flies a bit like a Hoopoe!), or of Killdeer, Pectoral Sandpiper, Lark Sparrow, etc, all vagrants in Britain.

Image 4b. You can see how much I didn’t like to draw legs and feet, which are hidden or omitted from almost all sketches! (1977-1978)

Image 4c. Never ignore the commoner birds, wherever you are; field notes and sketches from 1980-1981. (Of course, Black-tailed and Bar-tailed Godwits, Little Stint, and Little Gull are NOT common in North America!)

Image 4d. Notebook pages from my first few months in North America, where even the commonest birds were lifers! 1981.

Image 4e. Sketches made in the field while watching a Henslow’s Sparrow, Point Pelee, 5. May 1982. Still the only Henslow’s Sparrow I’ve seen, but at least I have some record of it. These are my original field notebook pages, torn out and taped into my field journal.

Image 4f. Arctic Warbler twitched in Britain, September 1981. A lifer for me, but after studying it for 1-2 hours I had a good idea what the species looked like – making it almost ‘straightforward’ to identify one in Mexico 10 years later.

Image 4g. Sketch made in the field while watching the bird, of ‘Arctic Warbler’ in Baja California, 12 October 1991. The first Mexican record, which came some years before the first California record.

Image 4h. Sketch ‘written up’ at the end of the day, and used to document the Mexican Arctic Warbler in a publication. From Western Birds, Volume 24, pages 53-56 (1993). Look at that, a year and a half to get something published. These days it would be up online within a day, if not an hour!

Image 4i. Arctic Warbler, near Nome Alaska, 21 June 2104. © Steve N. G. Howell. An OK memory shot, and nice to have. This image took a 1600th of a second, versus an hour of study. What teaches you more?

Images 4j. Field sketches of Piping Plover and Snowy Plover from Yucatan, Mexico, 28 November 1984. There are so many structural differences between these two species that when you’ve drawn them you may wonder why anyone would ever even use leg color as a field mark!
Love this series!
I would love to field sketch more. I have recently bought some new notebooks and I hope to draw in them more. I’m good at drawing,but my field sketching is terrible.Not much to sketch here in NZ, but I’m going to visit Aussie next year.
I only sketch with one pencil, cause I don’t like taking colored ones in to the field