I saw a coal tit on my walk to work just before Christmas! Cool birds! (Er, this is meant to express admiration at your birb-identifying abilities - mine are a bit shit, and I had to look the coal tit up.) Also, good cameras or binoculars are really helpful, particularly when trying to identify yet another Small Brown Bird.*
* Sometimes even my father, who has an encyclopaedic memory, keen eyes, and a deep love for spotting things, has been known to give up and go, "I dunno. It's a Small Brown Bird of some sort, and it's not having the decency to sit next to anything with obvious scale, or where we can see how it's sitting, and it's too far away to hear if it's making any identifying noises. It's a Small Brown Bird."
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(Er, this is meant to express admiration at your birb-identifying abilities - mine are a bit shit, and I had to look the coal tit up.) Also, good cameras or binoculars are really helpful, particularly when trying to identify yet another Small Brown Bird.*
* Sometimes even my father, who has an encyclopaedic memory, keen eyes, and a deep love for spotting things, has been known to give up and go, "I dunno. It's a Small Brown Bird of some sort, and it's not having the decency to sit next to anything with obvious scale, or where we can see how it's sitting, and it's too far away to hear if it's making any identifying noises. It's a Small Brown Bird."