Beginner's Guide

Learning to identify flowers, trees or birds can be a daunting business, but this page aims to help you with insider tips and some advice about the easiest things to spot each month.

Elsewhere in this section of the site (see menu at top of page), you can find a guide to nature books - some are more useful than others for beginners - and weekly tips on what to look for throughout the year. Last but not least, there is a full page for each month, describing everything you can see in the countryside at that particular time of year.

Why bother?

Birds sing, flowers look pretty – but who needs to know their names? Some people even think it is a rather sterile activity, which puts a wall between a person and their enjoyment of the countryside.

In fact, the opposite is true. I started learning flower names because one March I saw lots of a yellow flower everywhere and wondered idly what it was called (it was a lesser celandine). I then started noticing other flowers. My experience has been that the more flowers I can name, the more I see them. A country walk in spring or summer is now full of flowers that I would never have noticed a few years ago.

Knowing birdsong is equally rewarding. Instead of formless twittering, in your mind’s eye you can see chaffinches, blackbirds, great tits. Walks in February and March, when there are few other signs of spring, are transformed once you can identify the mating calls around you. And before I studied it, I never even noticed that all birdsong falls silent in August.

It takes effort

This is the bit no one wants to read. You can buy a book, you can read these tips, but the only way to learn flower names or trees or birds is to put in some effort. At the beginning, it can be particularly hard, because everything is new. As you go on, the possible identifications for a particular item start to narrow.

You will make no progress at all if you are not prepared from time to time to stop, get the book out and look something up. Sadly, walks with groups or friends are not very conducive to this, unless your friends share your interest. Better is to do a short nature walk alone each week, or to have a target to learn one new flower or tree a week.

Getting started with flowers

Flowers are the easiest and hardest things in nature to identify. They are easy because they have distinctive colours and shapes, and they are designed to be very visible. They are hard because there are so many – you might come across hundreds of different species in a single year.

The good news is that there are a few dozen common ones that are easy to learn: see the month by month tips below.

• When identifying flowers, it really helps to know what is in bloom that month: that can eliminate many possible matches right at the start. The single month pages in this section of the website (see menu at top of page) are designed to help you do just that.
• Mostly all you need to do is match the flower to the picture in the book, but sometimes you also need to look at the leaves or other plant features. For this reason it is better to identify the flower in situ when you can see all its details. Resist the temptation to try and remember what the flower looks like and look it up later: you will often find that you are missing key details if you try to do this.
• Never pick flowers to identify later. It is not only illegal, but it kills that flower. Suppose everyone did it? An alternative is to do a crude sketch. Record not just the flower shape, but the number of petals, leaf shape, and if the leaves are opposite each other on the stem or alternate.

Here are a few common flowers to look out for each month (ones in blue are photo links)

• JANUARY - snowdrop
• FEBRUARY - snowdrop, daffodil
• MARCH - lesser celandine, daffodil, primrose, wood anemone
• APRIL - as March, plus cuckoo flower, garlic mustard, stitchwort, ramsons, and of course bluebells.
• MAY - buttercup, ox-eye daisy, red campion, cow parsley, charlock, bugle
• JUNE - tufted vetch, foxgloves, hedge woundwort, mayweed, birdsfoot trefoil
• JULY - rosebay willowherb, ragwort, majoram, ladies bedstraw, knapweed
• AUGUST - yarrow, traveller’s joy, common fleabane, purple loosestrife, field scabious
• SEPTEMBER - michelmas daisy, Japanese knotweed

Getting started with trees

You might expect that the best way to learn trees (which for this purpose also includes hedgerow bushes and shrubs) is to recognise the different shapes of their leaves. In practice, this can be quite difficult, however. True, some trees – oaks, maples – have very distinctive leaf shapes, but a surprisingly large number are not that easy for a beginner to identify.

The tip here is to use the flowers and catkins of trees in spring, and their fruit, nuts or seeds in autumn as extra clues. Hornbeam and beech, for example, have fairly similiar leaves, but the seed clusters on hornbeam are unlike those on any other tree.

The result is that the two best times for learning trees is from March to May and from August to September. The good news for beginners is that a relatively small number of trees make up most of those you see in the countryside. (But see the second point below.)

• The best way to learn trees is to identify those in a local open space or woodland that visit often. Once you know a particular tree is a hazel or a beech, you can observe it all year and see how it changes with the seasons. You then recognise that tree whenever you see it in the countryside.
• You can also identify trees in city streets and parks, but here there are many ornamental and exotic varieties of trees that are not found in the wild. These can be fun to identify later on, but are confusing for a beginner.

Here are some monthly tips (ones in blue are photo links):

• JANUARY - hazel produces yellow catkins well before other trees
• FEBRUARY - alder is the only tree with catkins and cones; cherry plum blossoms
• MARCH - weeping willow and horse chestnut leaf. Willows produce catkins
• APRIL - maples flower, blackthorn blossoms, hornbeams are a mass of catkins
• MAY - hawthorn blossoms
• JUNE - elder flowers, as do wild roses
• AUGUST - red berries on hawthorn and wild roses. Plums and apples appear, as do sloes on blackthorn.
• SEPTEMBER - most trees have nuts, berries or fruit of some kind

Getting started with birds

The biggest challenge with birds – and it is a huge one – is that they are often hidden by foliage, and don’t sit still to be identified. In fact, they invariably fly off when they notice you are looking at them. So to see them clearly enough you need four things – patience, cunning, binoculars of some sort, and to be making the attempt when there are no leaves on the trees.

This makes the period from January to March the best time of all to learn birds. Mating songs are starting, and there is no foliage. Even then you can find yourself standing under a tree unable to see a bird that you can clearly hear.

Birdsong is even harder. You can’t look up birdsong in a book, and most people find a pattern of sound much harder to remember than a visual image. The tip here is to pick one song at a time that you know will be common at that time of year (see list below) and focus on identifying that. If you have a birdsong CD, copy it onto your iPod or MP3 player, so you can refer to it in the field. The RSPB website also has useful bird identifier pages, including brief song clips.

Once again, the good news, however, is that in the countryside in the south east (that is, excluding ducks and other waterfowl), a relative handful birds make up most of those you will see or hear singing. Here they are:

• JANUARY - robins make twittering noises, but great tits dominate with a see-saw call
• FEBRUARY - as February, plus blackbirds, song thrushes and chaffinches
• MARCH - as March, but listen out for the distinctive song of the chiffchaff
• APRIL & MAY - birdsong heaven. But foliage now hides the birds: if you haven't learnt their songs already, tough luck!
• JULY - silence descends as the mating season ends. House martins wheel overhead catching insects
• SEPTEMBER - robins start up again, and the main songsters for the rest of the year.
• OCTOBER and beyond - communal birds twitter to each other, especially blue tits, greenfinches and goldfinches. Large flocks of starlings and rooks

One final point worth making is that the best bird sightings are often opportunist. You look through your binoculars at what looks like a sparrow and it turns out to be a yellowhammer, or you look at a distant crow and find it is a green woodpecker. The lesson here is never assume you know what you are looking at: take a closer look.

© Peter Conway 2009, updated 2010 • All Rights Reserved