How to Identify Birds by Sight in Wetland Areas

How to Identify Birds by Sight in Wetland Areas
Hello. Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Peterson, and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today, we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts, where we'll be talking about bird identification and some of the equipment and essential tools that are useful to get one started in this incredibly interesting pastime. Throughout North America, wetland environments are of the more important birding habitat types. Some of them are coastal including things like sandy beaches, mud flats, and salt marshes. Others are interior wetlands like the fresh marsh behind me. In many of these cases, the bird species that occur in these interior fresh water wetlands can be quite elusive. And yet, many of them do have strong vocalizations that once learned can be appropriate for identification. Some of the birds like the Rails, the Virginia Rail, for example, and the Sora then to stay hidden in the cattails as do birds like the American Bittern that we described earlier. In the case of water foul like ducks and geese, they tend to be in the open water. And, long legged wading birds like the Great Blue Heron, for example, or the smaller Green Heron are often seen in the open standing in the shallows looking for fish and tadpoles underneath. A good way to observe wetland birds, is from a canoe or a kayak, or by simply sitting quietly at the edge of the marsh particularly in the very early morning, and then again late in the afternoon or dusk period just before dark. In fact, some wetland birds are active and actually will sing and call at night so that you have to be up early and you have to be willing to combat the mosquitoes in the evening. But, a visit to a fresh water marsh like the one behind me can often be a fascinating experience. Certainly, of all the wetland birds, one of the signature species throughout many marshes in the interior of the United States is the Red Wing Black Bird. This is a species where we see the males perched up on the tops of cattails with their red shoulder patches displaying.