IDENTIFYING BIRDS: Why Your Blurry and Low Quality Bird Pictures are Indeed Important

 IDENTIFYING BIRDS: Why Your Blurry Bird Pictures are Indeed Important

Even Though This Image is Really Low Quality, It allowed me to identify this bird as an adult male of the species Turdus merula (or Eurasian Blacbird). I know it is a male because it is completely dark and has a yellow beak.

You all have probably seen a bird that is a little bit interesting once and took a blurry picture of it with your low quality phone cameras. Later you probably tried to find something similar through google lens or other apps but nothing happened. After a while you all will probably decide that you need to free more space in your phone so you just delete the image without ever attempting to identifying the bird again. But what if I told you this image is really important? Not only could it be a rare bird, but also a new species (even though that would be really rare). But wait, how can you tell? Well, that's what we are going to be talking about today!

How to Identify A bird through a blurry picture?

Taking a look at the picture doesn't sound like much, but it can help you point out the main characteristics of the bird. For example, the bird in the picture below has a black area in the top of its head, its head is white, its back is grey and its belly is white. It has a long, black tail and a short beak. To help identify it you can also use your memory of its behaviour, in this case, the bird moved its tail up and down all the time.

You can now use some of its most noticable characteristics and behaviours such as it moving its tail like that (for the bird above) to look for relatives of this bird in google. And, if you are lucky, one of the first results you might see in the images might be fitting your bird! In chance they aren't but instead you see a really similar bird with different colouration, you can indeed find about that bird's name in wikipedia, then look at its relatives, and if your speculation was correct one of them could be your bird! Another way to identify birds from blurry pictures is through books. For example, I indentified this little guy above as a Motacilla alba (White Wigtail) through my copy of the Identification guide for birds of Greece, Cyprus and Europe by the Hellenic Ornithological Society (this is not a sponsor don't worry). Later, I attempted to find out about its age and gender. In some birds, this is nothing hard to do. But in others, it can get really frusturating. Thankfully, for this bird it was not hard and it turned out to be a fully grown adult male bird.

Now, there can be many problems with doing that, Including the fact that your best guess may actually not be native to the area in which your bird was spotted. That is a common problem, but it can really easily be avoided with little to no more reasearch.

A common buzzard, possibly an adult.

Thank you so much for reading this post! It didn't take as much as other posts do, but it definitely took half an hour! Anyways, that does not matter at all as long as you enjoyed it! Tommorow I am going on a whole day trip with school to Corfu Island and we are going to bring our phones here too! You know what that means, new photos! Anyways, do not forget to join my Viber Group! It actually is more of a reminder for new posts with extras, since you can't chat here (for privacy reasons).  We are one member away from six, and as I told you, when we reach 6 members I will start making fun activities in there such as polls for you to vote at!.You can join it today by clicking here! Ok, see you tommorow!