Author "In Defense of Hunting"

It's half an hour before sunrise in the marsh. Ducks and geese are milling about and shooting is legal.

You suddenly spot three dusky, gray-brown rockets moving at 35 mph headed straight for you. They're coming in low, out of nowhere, and you've got about two seconds to decide whether to shoot or not.

There is where bird identification can make the difference between a happy hunter and someone who has just broken a game law and may be looking at a steep fine.

Male pintails and male canvasbacks have distinctive shapes. A drake mallard's size and white neck ring are dead giveaways, as is a Canada goose's white cheek patch.

Snow geese and Ross' geese are not easily confused with non-game birds, except for swans and white pelicans, which are at least twice as big.

Small- to medium-size gray-brown waterfowl, however, are another story. Hen pintails, wood ducks, ring-necks, ruddy ducks, scaup, wigeon, gagarney, harlequin, and both sexes of gadwall and teal all look pretty much the same in low light. Shoot more than one pintail, and you're in trouble. Shoot seven gadwall, teal or widgeon and it's a legal limit.

ID is a key to success.

Later in the day when the sun's up and nothing's flying, you get up for a little stretch and decide to take a walk to see if you can kick up anything out of the marsh.

Ducks are possible, but let's not forget the greatest challenge to a wingshooter — snipe.

When one of these dove-size, long-bill, overgrown sandpipers explodes out thick grass at your feet, you've got a second — two, if you're lucky — to decide if this is a snipe … or an illegal curlew, willet, whimbrel, killdeer or rail … before the bird starts its zigzag flight and is gone.

Get the identification right and make the shot, and you're a hero. Get the ID wrong and make the shot, and you're in trouble with the law and feeling guilty.

Bird identification is a challenge, especially for a waterfowl hunter. Study is a necessity.

When I pick up the average birding field guide, I go straight to the pictures for an ID. Even with a Ph.D. and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bird-banding master permit, I find most keys to ID birds difficult to follow. So do many bird-watchers, including Mitchell Waite.

Waite got in the PC business at the start. While Jobs and Wozniak were launching the Apple, Mitch Waite was the guy who taught millions to learn to use their personal computers by writing the instruction manuals.

Waite was very successful as a computer-instruction writer. He became a publisher who built up his publishing business (Waite Group Press) and ultimately sold it to Simon and Schuster. This gave him a lot of free time to explore his passions, one of which was birding.

Waite found most field guides difficult to use, so he began to experiment applying his skills with computers and book publishing to creating a new kind of field guide, on the Internet, that is free and much more flexible and easy to use.

The result is WhatBird.com, which attracts 60,000 visitors per month, a number that is growing at a rate of about 10,000 a month.

The average visitor logging on to Waite's site is visiting 30 pages or more. Check it out and you'll soon see why.

What makes this ornithology search engine so special is that it uses object-based technology, which allows you to conduct identification searches according to state, body size, body shape, color and/or name.

Waite's system uses a patent-pending algorithm, which unlike other "all at once" search engines uses a step-by-step approach based on visual icons, virtually guaranteeing you'll find a match.

Once you've tracked down the bird, you can learn more about it, study hand-drawn portraits and even listen to its calls. And if you have questions, you can send them in to be answered by ornithologists David Lukas and Simone Whitecloud, or join into an online forum.

Can't take a computer with you into the field, you say. Drawing from this site's 820 birds, you can custom-make your own field guide by printing out the pages on your own computer. Even better, you can order a custom ID card, field guide, a large print of a bird or even design your own coffee-table book for reasonable prices.

The site is becoming a magnet for birders around the world. Soon there will be online classes on bird identification and drawing.

State waterfowl and hunting organizations ought to have a look at this system, because Waite's publishing program can allow you to purchase your own regional guides for a very reasonable price.

WhatBird.com has been so well received that Waite says he plans to develop ID systems for plants, mammals, trees, reptiles, insects and fish.

The scientific taxonomic system used to identify birds and other plants and animals today was developed by Carolus Linneaus, in the 1700s. It really hasn't changed that much since then.

Mitchell Waite's computer-based ID system is the first real quantum leap forward in bird identification since Linneaus.

Try it.

From ESPN Online October 2005
espn.go.com/outdoors/general/columns/swan_james/2197934.html