What is it that you do when you look at stuff
[I finally decided I didn't have good reasons for keeping this post locked, but I might change my mind again.]
This post is about the "how" of what people do when they try to observe living things or tell one species from another, not from a psychology of perception perspective, but just general techniques (I usually write about the "why", which is actually much harder to talk about). It is nominally about birds.
The bird in the two pictures below is one that none of you will recognize. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty confident you won't. I sure didn't when I first saw it. This makes it a great example for the purposes of this post. :)
Before getting into whatever else it is I wind up writing about, I'll give you some hints which won't help you any:
Okay, so here are some confusing birds:
So, what is it that I thought when I first saw these?
What would you have thought?
Most of you are probably thinking "er, a sparrow?" Confusing matters, your default "sparrow" might be the English sparrows you are familiar with in cities (aka "house sparrows").[2] That's a good start, but now you might be thinking "I know the sparrows outside my window have patches of black, white, and chestnut on their heads somewhere."[3] You might also get as far as "but, I think those are patches, not stripes."
What I was thinking was "Oh @#$%, that's one of those birds from a part of the book I didn't read. It looks like a sparrow and a killdeer got really drunk one night..." So, as I'm scrambling for both my camera and my field guide, what am I actually doing at that point (besides writing bizarre avian sex scenes in my head)?
I'm assembling a list of field marks:
Sparrow-shaped and sized (notice that this is a hugely complicated abstraction which the human brain can make in an instant, given that sparrows come in a diversity of sizes and shapes), curving and vaguely mask-like white and black lines on the face, lots of grey, including on the back of the head, reddish-brown on wing.[4] The thing that immediately strikes me as unsparrowlike is the fact that there is white between the beak and the eye -- there are some very common sparrows with white throats and white eye stripes, but not that weird mask-like bit.
Let's imagine, though, that we only had the female. We know we have a sparrow-like, mottled-brown bird, with a breast which is somewhat more solid than streaked, some sort of white stripe above its eye[5], and some sort of stripe around its neck. Unfortunately, the only really useful field mark is that second white stripe. Now, lots of sparrows have stripes which run from the corner of their beak downwards along the edge of their throat.[6] It's hard to tell where this one starts and ends on her, but we can see that at least part of it goes laterally along the top of her back, under part of her throat and the side of her neck. If we were sure that counted as a stripe, maybe going up to her beak and forming a sort of cheek patch, and if we could come down one way or the other on the streakedness of her breast, and a few other things, we could probably tell what she was without any other context. But without the male it's really doubtful, since birds vary between individuals just like humans do.
Now, we're kind of spoiled here -- the birds were out in the open, close enough to see fairly clearly, and they stayed there long enough for me to take their photos. This quote makes my point better than I can:
Here is a typical encounter between a beginner and a sparrow. The sparrow sets off the encounter by flying up onto a fence wire. Fighting off a sense of panic, the birder tries to focus on field marks. Does the bird have a streaked or plain breast? Streaked; okay. Is there or is there not a pale central stripe on the crown? Can't see that at this angle. What about a central breast spot? And wing bars; do those pale lines qualify as wing bars? At this point the bird drops back into the grass.[7]
-- Ken Kaufman, Advanced Birding
Kaufman then goes into a lot of details about sparrows, and what is happening in the brains of the kinds of people who, in the encounter above, know what kind of sparrow it is in a split second. Some of that involves moving beyond the kinds of field marks Peterson uses to subtle differences in shape and size, some is just being able to narrow things down based on habitat and behavior.
Throughout the book, he goes into a lot of abstractions about identifying birds. After a while I realized a lot of it wasn't necessarily advice about birds in particular, but was in fact advice for life. Specifically, it's advice for how to be aware of the world around you. Because I found so much of it so eye-opening, I've gone to some effort to boil a lot of the generalities down for you. I'm going to let you go through your own process of figuring out where and how to abstract away from these abstractions, though. You can probably learn some things about your relationships with people from your relationships with birds.
Some of the points below are my summaries of Kaufman, some are what I learned from his book that he didn't write explicitly, and some are just my own experience. It's all mixed together and I'm not going to cite everything like a journal article, so if you really want to know more, ask me about it in person.
- It can be helpful to understand basic anatomical features common to all birds.
- There are several kinds of field marks: those that uniquely identify a particular bird (bird A has a bizarre and unmistakable tail), those that are wholly relative (bird A has a longer tail than bird B), and those that are statistical (bird A usually has a longer tail than bird B). These are, obviously, presented in descending order of usefulness, BUT you still should try to observe all the information you can, because you don't know for sure what will be useful later. It's also important to be clear on what field marks mean and how far you can take them: Size, for instance, isn't as simple in real life as "which bird is bigger" -- your book might only give length when wingspan would be more helpful, or vice-versa.
- If you want to notice weird birds, closely study familiar ones. For example, for those of you in cities, take a really good look at a pair of English sparrows when you get a chance, and start going over in your head how you would describe them, in as much detail as possible.[8]
- Most people are less likely to make good observations of familiar birds which they think are weird, because there is no immediate need to. For instance, someone who moves from the east coast to the west coast and takes their hummingbird feeder with them is likely to be horribly intimidated once they see what shows up, because they never really looked at their one native east coast species before.
- If you learn to observe shapes, that will help you even when size is indeterminable, the light is bad, and the bird has really messed up plumage for some reason. You can't learn all shape distinctions from pictures, no matter how much it seems like you ought to be able to.
- There are limits to the resolution of drawings and photographs, or the tolerable length of a text description in a book.[9] If you pay attention to real birds you will learn things about them that it would have been impractical for books to convey.
- Your perception of size and color isn't as good as you think it is.
- The same birds look different under different conditions -- they molt, they get dirty, they puff up when they are cold or excited. They don't molt overnight, either.
- Relatedly, birds, like humans, grow from babies to adults in a continuous fashion. Some (e.g. many gulls) also take several years to grow up. It is not always practical to show you a picture of a species at every age, even if childhood accounts for many years of its life in absolute terms. The differences between juveniles and adults can be undocumented and confusing (e.g. proportions between body parts and colors of bills and feet). Looking at a picture of a baby and an adult doesn't necessarily help you extrapolate how everything happens in between. Don't assume juveniles will behave like adults -- they might hang out in different places or migrate at different times.
- Bribery works. In the case of feeders, not only will it sometimes get you more species than you could ever find if you were wandering around on foot, but it will bring them together under similar conditions.[See 8]
- The other side of the coin is not as attractive: Sometimes the only way to identify a bird is if it makes noise. Sometimes the only way to induce it to make noise is to scare it. If you scare it, it is likely to fly away and not come back.
- Some problems are genuinely complicated and there are no shortcuts to resolving them; a single paragraph description in your regular field guide might be worse than useless if you are unclear on what the guide can and cannot do for you. I have personally seen a lot of field-guide-induced overconfidence.
- Accept that some things are genuinely impossible, and move on. Some people think they can identify everything they run across; they are thoroughly delusional. Some species are visually completely indistinguishable under certain conditions (e.g. certain female hummingbirds). If you can't observe enough behavior to get external clues, you might only be able to tell them apart based on internal anatomy or DNA testing.
- Birds hybridize, escape from zoos and pet owners, can be blown far off course by storms, and can simply pick up and fly somewhere they're not supposed to be if they feel like it.
- Question authority. Every single field guide ever is full of bad advice, although it might be bad advice only in the situations you're finding yourself in.
- Specialized vocabulary reduces verbosity.
- Specialized vocabulary is not the same thing as standardized vocabulary.
- Try not to get into little fits of frustration over an activity you undertook just for fun.
Okay, I think that's more than enough for now. :)
Poll Yes, finally, there's a poll at the end of this post
Oh, right.
The birds in the photos!
I'll put that in comments.
[1] The Parking Lot Rule: On any sort of car-based sightseeing trip, 80% of the most interesting things you find will be in or very near the parking lot. This sounds ridiculous until you realize that parking lots tend to be liminal spaces -- they create forest borders, are often placed near water, and so on. So wildlife will take advantage of that.
[2] These are old world sparrows, from a family we have no native representatives of, but "sparrow" is kind of a generic term anyway. Even with our native ones, it's just a label applied to some, but not all, genera in a broader family. Distilling the Essence of Sparrowness is an advanced procedure in sociolinguistic potion-making.
[3] "Sooty city birds often bear a poor resemblance to clean country males with black throat, white cheeks, chestnut nape." -- Peterson
[4] The better terms here are that the grey is on the nape of the neck, and the reddish-brown is normally called "chestnut".
[5] Techincally, an eyebrow-like stripe on a bird is a supercilium. Also, whether or not the breast is streaked is less informative than most field guides would lead you to believe.
[6] These would be, depending on where, adjacent to the beak, they originate: moustachial stripes, submoustachial stripes, and malar stripes. The two photos I've got here don't have the resolution to let you tell the difference, though.
[7] As I have mentioned many times before, I really, really detest the term "birder". It is offensive in the way of all claims that any group of people can "own" any specialized knowledge, expertise, experience, worldview, or narrative. And yes, I think that's morally equivalent to some of the stuff that has been said in some recent unpleasantness on LJ communities I don't read. Information is no place for mysticism -- people get hurt when you do things to scare them away from knowledge. (What isn't mysticism is when people's feelings are hurt by you being stupid or wrong and misrepresenting them; you are still free to dig yourself into those holes). Also, I think people will be having pet peeves about words like "birder" long after humanity has forgotten what "races" were or how gender was constructed back in the dark ages of the 21st century.
Assuming we don't kill all the birds first, I guess. :(
[8] The very best example of this that I can give you is available to those of you in the SF Bay area -- go down to Lake Merritt in Oakland and spend a very long time looking at the scaup ducks. Usually they have both greater and lesser scaup ducks in the same place (that is, eating all sorts of bizarre things people are feeding them). Eventually you will find that you can break a mass of previously indistinguishable ducks apart into two varieties, but at first it's nearly impossible even with the bird book. It took me two trips to Oakland before I was sure I could tell them apart.
[9] Wikipedia, however, will sometimes come through for you. You should all be grateful for the quiet work of people like squirrelitude, who take photos of poorly-documented things and put them in the public domain.
This post is about the "how" of what people do when they try to observe living things or tell one species from another, not from a psychology of perception perspective, but just general techniques (I usually write about the "why", which is actually much harder to talk about). It is nominally about birds.
The bird in the two pictures below is one that none of you will recognize. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty confident you won't. I sure didn't when I first saw it. This makes it a great example for the purposes of this post. :)
Before getting into whatever else it is I wind up writing about, I'll give you some hints which won't help you any:
- As you can see, it is sexually dimorphic.
- It is migratory.
- The male is wearing his summer plumage.
- This picture was taken somewhere in the lower 48, within the bird's normal summer range.
- The photo of the male gives you all the field marks you need to identify it. You might be able to work out what the female is without the male, but it's iffy.
- Yes, the photos were taken in a parking lot.[1]
- If you live in the continental US or Canada, and own any sort of generic guide to birds, this bird is probably in it.
Okay, so here are some confusing birds:
So, what is it that I thought when I first saw these?
What would you have thought?
Most of you are probably thinking "er, a sparrow?" Confusing matters, your default "sparrow" might be the English sparrows you are familiar with in cities (aka "house sparrows").[2] That's a good start, but now you might be thinking "I know the sparrows outside my window have patches of black, white, and chestnut on their heads somewhere."[3] You might also get as far as "but, I think those are patches, not stripes."
What I was thinking was "Oh @#$%, that's one of those birds from a part of the book I didn't read. It looks like a sparrow and a killdeer got really drunk one night..." So, as I'm scrambling for both my camera and my field guide, what am I actually doing at that point (besides writing bizarre avian sex scenes in my head)?
I'm assembling a list of field marks:
Sparrow-shaped and sized (notice that this is a hugely complicated abstraction which the human brain can make in an instant, given that sparrows come in a diversity of sizes and shapes), curving and vaguely mask-like white and black lines on the face, lots of grey, including on the back of the head, reddish-brown on wing.[4] The thing that immediately strikes me as unsparrowlike is the fact that there is white between the beak and the eye -- there are some very common sparrows with white throats and white eye stripes, but not that weird mask-like bit.
Let's imagine, though, that we only had the female. We know we have a sparrow-like, mottled-brown bird, with a breast which is somewhat more solid than streaked, some sort of white stripe above its eye[5], and some sort of stripe around its neck. Unfortunately, the only really useful field mark is that second white stripe. Now, lots of sparrows have stripes which run from the corner of their beak downwards along the edge of their throat.[6] It's hard to tell where this one starts and ends on her, but we can see that at least part of it goes laterally along the top of her back, under part of her throat and the side of her neck. If we were sure that counted as a stripe, maybe going up to her beak and forming a sort of cheek patch, and if we could come down one way or the other on the streakedness of her breast, and a few other things, we could probably tell what she was without any other context. But without the male it's really doubtful, since birds vary between individuals just like humans do.
Now, we're kind of spoiled here -- the birds were out in the open, close enough to see fairly clearly, and they stayed there long enough for me to take their photos. This quote makes my point better than I can:
Here is a typical encounter between a beginner and a sparrow. The sparrow sets off the encounter by flying up onto a fence wire. Fighting off a sense of panic, the birder tries to focus on field marks. Does the bird have a streaked or plain breast? Streaked; okay. Is there or is there not a pale central stripe on the crown? Can't see that at this angle. What about a central breast spot? And wing bars; do those pale lines qualify as wing bars? At this point the bird drops back into the grass.[7]
-- Ken Kaufman, Advanced Birding
Kaufman then goes into a lot of details about sparrows, and what is happening in the brains of the kinds of people who, in the encounter above, know what kind of sparrow it is in a split second. Some of that involves moving beyond the kinds of field marks Peterson uses to subtle differences in shape and size, some is just being able to narrow things down based on habitat and behavior.
Throughout the book, he goes into a lot of abstractions about identifying birds. After a while I realized a lot of it wasn't necessarily advice about birds in particular, but was in fact advice for life. Specifically, it's advice for how to be aware of the world around you. Because I found so much of it so eye-opening, I've gone to some effort to boil a lot of the generalities down for you. I'm going to let you go through your own process of figuring out where and how to abstract away from these abstractions, though. You can probably learn some things about your relationships with people from your relationships with birds.
Some of the points below are my summaries of Kaufman, some are what I learned from his book that he didn't write explicitly, and some are just my own experience. It's all mixed together and I'm not going to cite everything like a journal article, so if you really want to know more, ask me about it in person.
- It can be helpful to understand basic anatomical features common to all birds.
- There are several kinds of field marks: those that uniquely identify a particular bird (bird A has a bizarre and unmistakable tail), those that are wholly relative (bird A has a longer tail than bird B), and those that are statistical (bird A usually has a longer tail than bird B). These are, obviously, presented in descending order of usefulness, BUT you still should try to observe all the information you can, because you don't know for sure what will be useful later. It's also important to be clear on what field marks mean and how far you can take them: Size, for instance, isn't as simple in real life as "which bird is bigger" -- your book might only give length when wingspan would be more helpful, or vice-versa.
- If you want to notice weird birds, closely study familiar ones. For example, for those of you in cities, take a really good look at a pair of English sparrows when you get a chance, and start going over in your head how you would describe them, in as much detail as possible.[8]
- Most people are less likely to make good observations of familiar birds which they think are weird, because there is no immediate need to. For instance, someone who moves from the east coast to the west coast and takes their hummingbird feeder with them is likely to be horribly intimidated once they see what shows up, because they never really looked at their one native east coast species before.
- If you learn to observe shapes, that will help you even when size is indeterminable, the light is bad, and the bird has really messed up plumage for some reason. You can't learn all shape distinctions from pictures, no matter how much it seems like you ought to be able to.
- There are limits to the resolution of drawings and photographs, or the tolerable length of a text description in a book.[9] If you pay attention to real birds you will learn things about them that it would have been impractical for books to convey.
- Your perception of size and color isn't as good as you think it is.
- The same birds look different under different conditions -- they molt, they get dirty, they puff up when they are cold or excited. They don't molt overnight, either.
- Relatedly, birds, like humans, grow from babies to adults in a continuous fashion. Some (e.g. many gulls) also take several years to grow up. It is not always practical to show you a picture of a species at every age, even if childhood accounts for many years of its life in absolute terms. The differences between juveniles and adults can be undocumented and confusing (e.g. proportions between body parts and colors of bills and feet). Looking at a picture of a baby and an adult doesn't necessarily help you extrapolate how everything happens in between. Don't assume juveniles will behave like adults -- they might hang out in different places or migrate at different times.
- Bribery works. In the case of feeders, not only will it sometimes get you more species than you could ever find if you were wandering around on foot, but it will bring them together under similar conditions.[See 8]
- The other side of the coin is not as attractive: Sometimes the only way to identify a bird is if it makes noise. Sometimes the only way to induce it to make noise is to scare it. If you scare it, it is likely to fly away and not come back.
- Some problems are genuinely complicated and there are no shortcuts to resolving them; a single paragraph description in your regular field guide might be worse than useless if you are unclear on what the guide can and cannot do for you. I have personally seen a lot of field-guide-induced overconfidence.
- Accept that some things are genuinely impossible, and move on. Some people think they can identify everything they run across; they are thoroughly delusional. Some species are visually completely indistinguishable under certain conditions (e.g. certain female hummingbirds). If you can't observe enough behavior to get external clues, you might only be able to tell them apart based on internal anatomy or DNA testing.
- Birds hybridize, escape from zoos and pet owners, can be blown far off course by storms, and can simply pick up and fly somewhere they're not supposed to be if they feel like it.
- Question authority. Every single field guide ever is full of bad advice, although it might be bad advice only in the situations you're finding yourself in.
- Specialized vocabulary reduces verbosity.
- Specialized vocabulary is not the same thing as standardized vocabulary.
- Try not to get into little fits of frustration over an activity you undertook just for fun.
Okay, I think that's more than enough for now. :)
Poll Yes, finally, there's a poll at the end of this post
Oh, right.
The birds in the photos!
I'll put that in comments.
[1] The Parking Lot Rule: On any sort of car-based sightseeing trip, 80% of the most interesting things you find will be in or very near the parking lot. This sounds ridiculous until you realize that parking lots tend to be liminal spaces -- they create forest borders, are often placed near water, and so on. So wildlife will take advantage of that.
[2] These are old world sparrows, from a family we have no native representatives of, but "sparrow" is kind of a generic term anyway. Even with our native ones, it's just a label applied to some, but not all, genera in a broader family. Distilling the Essence of Sparrowness is an advanced procedure in sociolinguistic potion-making.
[3] "Sooty city birds often bear a poor resemblance to clean country males with black throat, white cheeks, chestnut nape." -- Peterson
[4] The better terms here are that the grey is on the nape of the neck, and the reddish-brown is normally called "chestnut".
[5] Techincally, an eyebrow-like stripe on a bird is a supercilium. Also, whether or not the breast is streaked is less informative than most field guides would lead you to believe.
[6] These would be, depending on where, adjacent to the beak, they originate: moustachial stripes, submoustachial stripes, and malar stripes. The two photos I've got here don't have the resolution to let you tell the difference, though.
[7] As I have mentioned many times before, I really, really detest the term "birder". It is offensive in the way of all claims that any group of people can "own" any specialized knowledge, expertise, experience, worldview, or narrative. And yes, I think that's morally equivalent to some of the stuff that has been said in some recent unpleasantness on LJ communities I don't read. Information is no place for mysticism -- people get hurt when you do things to scare them away from knowledge. (What isn't mysticism is when people's feelings are hurt by you being stupid or wrong and misrepresenting them; you are still free to dig yourself into those holes). Also, I think people will be having pet peeves about words like "birder" long after humanity has forgotten what "races" were or how gender was constructed back in the dark ages of the 21st century.
Assuming we don't kill all the birds first, I guess. :(
[8] The very best example of this that I can give you is available to those of you in the SF Bay area -- go down to Lake Merritt in Oakland and spend a very long time looking at the scaup ducks. Usually they have both greater and lesser scaup ducks in the same place (that is, eating all sorts of bizarre things people are feeding them). Eventually you will find that you can break a mass of previously indistinguishable ducks apart into two varieties, but at first it's nearly impossible even with the bird book. It took me two trips to Oakland before I was sure I could tell them apart.
[9] Wikipedia, however, will sometimes come through for you. You should all be grateful for the quiet work of people like squirrelitude, who take photos of poorly-documented things and put them in the public domain.