Bird Identification by Description: 8 Clues in Order

A description identifies a bird when it answers the questions a field guide sorts by, in the order that removes the most candidates first. Kenn Kaufman's identification advice for Audubon puts it this way:

• Group: decide the family first. There are more than 800 species in North America, and the group alone removes most of them.
• Shape: the silhouette places a bird in its group more reliably than color does.
• Size: compare it with a bird you know, such as a robin.
• Behavior: hopping, climbing a trunk, wading, flocking.
• Habitat: Kaufman calls habitat an excellent clue most of the time, because birds stay in the places they prefer.
• Season: many species are predictable by time of year in a given region.
• Field marks: stripes, spots, eye rings and tail patterns.
• Voice: a call or song is often the fastest way to confirm an identification.

Color comes last on purpose. The same species can look different in spring and fall, and a young bird can look nothing like its parents.

Write these down while the bird is still in view, or right after. Each line matches a filter in the Audubon online guide or a question in the free apps below, so a filled-in note can be entered directly.

• Where and when: state or county, date, time of day.
• Size: compare it with a sparrow, robin, crow, mallard or crane. These are the size classes the Audubon guide filters by.
• Shape: bill thick and cone-shaped, thin and pointed, hooked, or long; tail short, long, forked or fanned; legs short or long.
• Behavior: on the ground, clinging to a trunk, in the treetops, wading, swimming, soaring, hovering or flying straight. Audubon's guide filters flight by soaring, hovering and direct flight.
• Habitat: yard, forest, marsh, open field, shoreline, city.
• Marks: eye ring or eyebrow stripe, wing bars, streaks or spots on the breast, a colored rump patch, white in the tail.
• Voice: write the rhythm in your own syllables, even if it looks silly.
• Colors: last, and by body part rather than overall.

The American Bird Conservancy gives similar advice for beginners: sketch or write notes, record the season and place, and learn the 20 to 50 most widespread species in your area first.

• Audubon Guide to North American Birds (web): 830 species, filtered by family, region, size, color, habitat and flight pattern.
• Audubon Bird Guide app: free, with more than 800 North American species, more than 3,000 photos and more than eight hours of songs and calls. Its Bird ID tool asks what color the bird was, how big it was and what its tail looked like, and narrows the list for your location and date as you answer.
• Merlin Bird ID (Cornell Lab of Ornithology): free. It asks a few simple questions and returns a list of likely species for your location. Wikipedia's article on the app says it covers about 3,000 species across the Americas, Western Europe and India, that its Sound ID recognizes some 450 North American species, and that it reached 10 million users as of 2025.
• All About Birds (Cornell Lab): the online guide that Wild Birds Unlimited of Bend recommends for identification.

Both apps use where and when you saw the bird to narrow the list, which is why the location and date lines in your notes matter as much as the colors.

These are descriptions people often type, matched to the species the sources on this page describe that way. Treat each as a first guess to check against a range map.

• Small gray bird walking head-first down a tree trunk: White-breasted Nuthatch (American Bird Conservancy).
• Small black-and-white striped bird creeping along bark: Black-and-white Warbler; Audubon calls the tree-creeping the best mark.
• Gray bird with white wing patches, long tail, copies other birds' songs: Northern Mockingbird, which can learn up to 200 songs (American Bird Conservancy).
• Gray bird on the ground under the feeder that flashes white outer tail feathers: Dark-eyed Junco.
• Brown bird with a red face and chest at the feeder: male House Finch.
• Small yellowish bird that keeps bobbing its tail on the ground: Palm Warbler (Audubon).
• Tiny hovering 'hummingbird' sipping from flowers that looks too small: it may be a hummingbird moth. The International Hummingbird Society's test is to count the legs: six means insect.
• Large white wading bird with a curved red bill: adult White Ibis (Audubon).
• Large white bird with a yellow bill and black legs: Great Egret (Audubon).

More matches are on the backyard birds, owl identification and hawk identification pages.

A photo removes the guesswork from shape and marks, because the app sees the same bill, wing bars and tail you would have had to describe.

• BirdLens: photograph the bird and the app identifies it.
• Merlin Photo ID: Cornell's free app also identifies from photos; Wikipedia notes that Bird ID and Photo ID require separate downloads.
• Google Lens: Google says Lens can identify things from a picture, giving the examples of a plant or the kind of dog you saw, and that it is available in the Google app, Google Photos, Chrome and the camera of some Android phones.

Whichever tool you use, check the answer against the range and season. An app can return a species that looks right but does not occur where you are.

Research and drafting for this page were assisted by AI and checked line by line against the sources listed below. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it.