What’s wrong with this picture? Well, too many things to mention, but the one I want to draw your attention to is the arrangement of Big Bird’s feathers. He’s got no feather tracts! Bird feathers do not just grow randomly all over a bird’s anatomy. They are arranged in groups, known as tracts, and, since almost all birds have the same arrangement of feather tracts (penguins are one exception), it is well worth becoming familiar with them.
There are loads of good websites about bird topography (and some bad ones!), so I won’t reinvent the wheel here. Here’s a good primer, although it uses American English terminology (so Brits would use “ear coverts” instead of “auriculars” and “axillaries” rather than “axillars”). Here’s another, and if you want to test yourself to see how much you’ve remembered, here are lots of bird topography quizzes.
Knowing your feather tracts is a huge help in understanding what you see. Going back to our Eurasian Tree Sparrow, for example, knowing the feathers tracts will greatly help you understand how the patterns of colour are arranged. Otherwise, they are just random blotches.
Usually, when describing a bird, we divide it up into 5 basic areas: 1. Head 2. Upperparts 3. Underparts 4. Wings 5. Bare Parts (Eye and fleshy bits around it, bill, legs).
Then, each of those five areas are broken down into smaller parts, corresponding with feather tracts on the feathered parts of the body and various sections of the bare parts.
There are about 30 – 40 terms you need to become familiar with to accurately describe a bird. This is too many to remember at one go, so it is helpful to print out some of the topographical diagrams in the links above and paste them into a notebook, or keep them somewhere where you can refer to them often.
After you’ve referred to the links above, and when you think you’ve got a reasonable idea of the terms and what they refer to, have a go at labelling this annotated photo. The five colours refer to the five basic areas. Send me your lists in the response section. Have fun!
Dig deep 