Ornithology B/C

[pepperonipi]

Seconding all the opinions above, as field guides aren't great on the day of competition (you're not going to flip through 200+ pages looking for a yellow bird with white eyerings and two white wingbars) except for when you're stuck deciding between two species.
viewtopic.php?f=313&t=15391&start=10#p397670
I also found this post from last year very helpful. While learning all the flashy males in the first place can seem quite overwhelming (and it's okay if that's what you want to stick to for a while), learning general characteristics that help you ID females and juveniles as well pays off much more in the long run.

I agree. Also, if ID starts to get frustrating (ex, you're trying to tell the difference between two species and just cannot), take a break and come back later. Give yourself some time, and let these images develop in your brain for a bit. Don't try to force yourself to rush the info into your head.

[NSP01]

Hey,
So I like a lot of people are doing ornithology online this Saturday. We have made documents with information about each family and the birds in it. However, loading the documents takes a lot of time. Since it's a nearpod, we have to be able to access the information realllly fast (<2 minutes).

What could we possibly do to like overcome this problem?

[DragonTownEpic]

Judging from what I can find on the internet about nearpod, I assume that you currently keep all of your documents online. While many competitions this year do allow students to access notes online, a physical binder has many benefits over online notes.

I would recommend printing out your documents and putting them into a physical binder (not exceeding 2 inches). To help with speed, you can group up your documents and organize them into different sections with binder separators. Sheet protectors are also useful for binder flipping.

Hope I helped!

[llxlexillx]

this test really helped me for studying because there was quite a few of these birds on the test so it felt reliable.

[scispork]

Hi. For whatever reason, I made this bar graph of bird frequencies. The tests I looked over were the Division C tests from the following invitationals:

BEARSO, UT, SoFo, UGA, Mockvitational, Rickards, Camas, Pearl City, Yosemite, Yale, Case Western Reserve, UChicago, MIT, SOAPS, GGSO, Princeton, Duke, River Hill, Mason, BirdSO, and UMichigan.

This totals out to be 21 invitationals, containing 581 birds.

NB: Please take this graph with a grain of salt since I may have missed bird appearances as I was going through each test. Additionally, the methodology to determine whether or not a bird "appeared" in the tests was quite subjective. (e.g. every time Brown-headed Cowbird parasitism was mentioned, I did not list it as an appearance unless there was an ID station which included Brown-headed Cowbird.)

Bird Frequencies.png

[sciolyperson1]

Hi all!

We're running Ornithology for this month's SMEC! To learn more, head over to our forums thread and register at the google form here!