Tools for tracking bird migration, online courses, bird videos and books

Spring bird migration is underway. You can remove some of the guesswork about days with boom or bust potential by using a radar-based bird-tracking site.

Live bird migration maps are published daily at birdcast.info. Color-coded maps created in real time show you bird movement throughout the continent. Just bookmark birdcast.info.

Roger Tory Peterson called them "confusing fall warblers" because of their drab plumage. For backyard or casual birders, identifying brightly colored spring warblers can be a challenge, too.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology can help you with a 15-hour online identification class. There are short training videos, still photos for more practice, information on clues provided by bird movement and song, free identification posters you can download, and more.

Price is $98. The course can be taken and completed at your own pace.

The address is academy.allaboutbirds.org.

A daily brief nature film is offered at website nature365.tv by famed Minnesota photographer Jim Brandenburg. A native of Worthington and resident of Ely, his worldwide work has often been published in National Geographic magazine. Birds often are featured.

"The turkey vulture holds a special role in American history because Wilbur Wright spent a day studying the bird's dihedral flight patterns to learn how to achieve stability when designing the wings for the Wright brothers' first biplane," Henderson wrote.

"Wright observed that the dihedral pattern of the vulture's flight was characterized by the ability to maintain balance by depressing the secondary feathers of a wing when one wing dipped downward, so it would 'self right.'

"He went home that night and drew up the design for the aileron and submitted it for a patent. He took the idea for today's airplane ailerons from turkey vultures at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina." J.W.

A reminder about wood ticks and deer ticks — they have become more widespread and greater in number than ever. Birding is a tick-possible activity, now more than ever.

I mention this because in the past two weeks, for the first time in our 16 years in this house, we have found — the hard way — both varieties of tick in our yard. We live in an Orono neighborhood, not mid-city for certain, but never before, for us, tick territory. We have a brushy corner back against the woody swamp that is the end of our yard, but still, hey, we're 20 minutes from Target Center.

I try now to avoid brush and high grass or other vegetation. I tell myself this is why I have binoculars.

David Allen Sibley, author/artist of very popular field guides to bird identification, has a new book that is beautiful and wonderful. A bit unusual for books about birds, it's a page-turner.

"What It's Like to Be a Bird" is 8.5 by 11 inches in size to accommodate some of Sibley's best bird art. The birds in the full-page paintings could fly out of the book.

Sibley opens with several pages of brief definitions. Each is cued to one of the following pages. There he describes and elaborates on what it's like to be a bird, explaining particular behavior. He is a good writer.

He adds more paintings on those pages to illustrate what he is writing about. (A man, a roadrunner, a fox, and an ostrich running a race. Guess who wins.)

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 203 pages, heavily illustrated, $35.

A new field guide to identification of North American birds has just been published for the National Audubon Society.

First, the strong points. In this 907-page book are over 800 accounts describing plumage, voice, nesting, range, conservation and similar species.

The first 23 pages contain a very good summary of bird biology, behavior and distribution. It is an ornithology short course.

There is a second shoe, however, and here is when it drops.

I have many field guide books. Use over the years has trained me to understand that the lead photo in any instance will be of a male bird in breeding plumage.

In the Audubon guide the photo I see first stretches across the top of the page (leaving space only for tiny range maps.) It's the lead photo. If the necessary horizontal photo isn't available, well, how about using photos of the female of the species, or a photo of a male that misses the defining plumage? Bad ideas.

Somewhere on most pages a decent photo of a breeding male is used. But those photos are secondary to the one most readers (me, at least) would assume is definitive. Not to slight female birds, but that plumage is not recognized as easily as that of breeding males. There are no captions to guide you.

I did not look at all 800-plus accounts. I paid most attention to birds we could see here. But I saw photos of questionable quality or photos that were just plain misleading. How do you trust any photo at that point?

For instance, the lead photo for yellow warbler shows a yellow bird with a solid red head. There is such a subspecies, sometimes found in southern Texas, Arizona and California. If you see one in Minnesota, send me a note.