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Lev Parikian's avatar

Thank you so much for the mention. I absolutely know what you mean about identifying birds of prey – and it’s always better to be under- rather than over-confident, I reckon.

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Deb Champion's avatar

There’s actually only 3 types of birds of prey- red kites, owls and not owls. This classification system increases reliability of identification.

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Anne Thomas's avatar

I often catch myself asserting a bird or tree identification in my Detail Diary because it’s more poetic and concrete to have a specific name and I’m reasonably confident, only to look it up later and be totally wrong. It’s true, no one would know, but it’s probably a bad habit to offhandedly categorize like that.

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Deb Champion's avatar

i should probably assume unless the bird or tree formally introduces itself that ,y confidence is misplaced

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Liz New's avatar

Have you seen the app called Merlin, in which you can record and identify bird sounds? Someone showed it to me on Friday and I've been obsessed with it since then!

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Deb Champion's avatar

Yes, I took it to Otmoor and it didn’t hear a thing. 2000 lapwings and assorted bird noises including screaming cranes and it said there was nothing. Maybe my phone is deaf 🤷‍♀️

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