Identify birds by color, size, shape, and other visible features seen in the field. This section is built for the situation every birder knows: a bird appears, you register a colour and an impression of size, and it is gone before you can work through a field guide.
The guides here start from what you actually saw. They are organised by the most obvious visual cue — red birds, blue birds, yellow birds, brown birds, black-and-white birds — and then narrowed by place, so that a guide covers the blue birds of Michigan or the red birds of Illinois rather than every blue bird in the world. That combination matters: colour alone leaves too many candidates, but colour plus location usually leaves a handful, and a handful is something you can compare.
Each guide shows the birds that genuinely fit the description in that area, with photographs chosen to show the colour as it reads in the field rather than under ideal light. The notes point to the features that separate similar-looking birds — where exactly the colour sits on the body, how much of it there is, what the bill and silhouette look like, and what the bird was doing when you saw it.
Female and immature birds are included deliberately, because they are the usual reason a colour-led search fails. A bird that is not the bright male in the illustration is still the same species, and these guides show both.
Size and shape guides work the same way, for cases where the colour was unremarkable but the proportions were not.
Start here when you have a colour and a location and no name.
