Dendroica--a new bird identification training program

Environment Canada and the USGS Breeding Bird Survey office have just announced the launch of the bird identification training program Dendroica: An aid to the identification of North American Birds. Dendroica is an interactive website designed to help students, volunteers and professionals improve their skills at identifying birds by sight or by sound, particularly so that they can participate in nature survey and monitoring programs, including Breeding Bird Atlases. The site includes bird species from throughout Canada, the USA, and Mexico. The program includes up to 8 or more different sound recordings and photographs for each species as well as descriptions of the songs of each species. Although there are still a number of gaps in our coverage, especially from Mexico, the program also allows participants to contribute new photographs and sound recordings, so it will continue to improve over time. We hope that, as more people use the program, we will be able to fill many of our gaps in coverage -- although we already have more than 4000 each of photos and sound recordings.

To use all of the features of the program, participants should register (registration is free) and sign-in on the Dendroica website. This will allow users to select lists of species to study, such as all the breeding (or non-breeding) species in a particular region, or species with a particular song type or from a particular taxonomic group, or they can make their own lists. They can then study the photos or sound recordings and read the song descriptions for the selected species before quizzing themselves to see how well they are doing. The quiz randomly picks songs and/or photos (users can choose) from among the list available for each species. This is particularly valuable for learning bird songs because we have multiple recordings of most species, so users don't always get the same recording for a particular species.

Give it a try—you’ll find it fun and very informative!