Mini-Tutorial: Pointing Out a Bird

Mini-tutorial offering guidance on sharing the location of a bird with birders in your group. First lesson: don't actually point! Old standbys like the face-of-a-clock approach and "V" in trees are covered, then we take things one step further. The key: get everyone to the same starting point and then use features in the landscape to get everyone on the bird.

[diannbilderback]

Such a wonderfully practical tutorial! Being able to give good directions to get on a bird is a very useful skill, and one that your birding friends will greatly appreciate.

[Tigerpuffer]

This video was fantastic. I often find myself lending out a spare pair of binoculars to friends who havent done much birding, and this is a constant challenge. I will sometimes use pointing for a distant bird, but to do so requires us to stand next to each other, and to have our heads very close together and looking in the same direction, so they can actually look down the end of my arm, past my pointed finger, and follow it to where I'm pointing at.

Last year during a Christmas bird count, while straining to see a skulky LeConte's sparrow in dense grass, our crew leader did something that left me speechless. Don't try this with a bird that is very close... you may scare it with all the moving around. He looked right at the bird, had me stand directly behind him, and told me to point my binoculars at the back of his head. Once I did so, he bent over (I suppose in a more fragile situation you could take a quiet step to the side) and right where I was looking, where the back of his head had been, was a LeConte's sparrow. it was like a magic trick.