Archive for Quizzes
Your Birding Ancestry
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the most interesting questions in modern birding is that of intellectual heritage: How and by whom are birding knowledge, culture, and ethics passed down?
Help me think about this by answering two easy questions:
1. Who was your birding mentor?
2. Who was that person’s birding mentor?
You may need to talk to the answer to the first before you can answer the second. But it will be worth it.
A Coot and a Quiz
Posted by: | CommentsI’ll admit to a fondness of all things coot, and Eurasian Coot is surely one of the most elegant of the genus.
They’re no less fractious than their American cousins, of course, but still, a beautiful sight when they’re floating, peaceful for the moment, on a lovely little park pond.
Here’s a good quiz: can you find half a dozen visual differences between the bird in the photo and American Coot? Bet you can.
Quiz
Posted by: | CommentsMost birding quizzes ask you to identify a photo.
Not this one.
What do you think this is? (No googling!)
Superciliary space, suborbital and malar regions, greater part of auricular region, chin, and throat very pale bluish gray; a loral patch (extending more or less broadly across base of forehead), narrow postocular streak, and a black collar beginning on nape (beneath crest) and extending thence downward across end of auricular region and along side of neck and connecting with a broader, somewhat crescentic patch across chest, black.
Coues, In a Lighter Vein
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been re-reading Elliot Coues’s Key, in the 1903 edition, and find myself alternately shaking my head in admiring wonder and laughing out loud in delight. It truly is the best bird book ever written, and if you haven’t read it, make immediate amends.
Here’s a quiz. Of what bird did Coues write:
Very erratic and capricious in its movements–surprises are always in order…until brought to the table on toast…and even then the bill is likely to be a surprise, if it is presented in a fashionable restaurant.
The first correct answer left as a comment here at the B-log wins a half day’s guided birding this summer in southeast Arizona.
NO GOOGLING ALLOWED! But if you do google it, you’ll find one of the greatest examples of blatant plagiarism in the history of North American ornithology.
How About a Quiz?
Posted by: | CommentsHow about sex, age…and subspecies?
Click for a bigger image.
March 26, 2010; Vancouver, BC.
