When I was 12 I had a fascination with raptors. Whenever I saw one, I would look up and claim it was an eagle. But I never really knew which and had no binoculars. But there was nobody to correct me :-)
Upon starting my nature guiding course I would stop the car, point at a feathery thing and in awe claim "bird". But I was now surrounded by aspiring guides many of whom were avid birders. And so they would roll their eyes, or laugh at me or help me to ID them (it was usually a common bulbul).
Yet well until my level 1, I lived in fear of my assessor asking me "hey what bird is that?". Only over time I discovered that birding - as it is now called and becoming quite popular - is learnable! So I would just keep looking at every bird through my 1.5 kg 7x42 Zeiss lead glass binoculars. And still I would need to compare them in a bird book or an app and get them wrong. I must have asked my instructors "hey what bird is that?" or just guessed wrong a million times. The instructors would barely glimpse at the bird and just "know".
It's not that they just have high definition eyeballs, but that over time it turns out you develop a method, an intuition. And you see a detail. The body shape, the way is flies, the color of the beak, feathers on the legs, a wattle somewhere around, the wing coloration, habitat, and maybe most importantly: their calls.
The final exercise in Eco Training is "Advanced Birding". It is also the only exam that a grand majority of students fail. And understandably so: You need to ID around 200 birds, both from a photo and seperately from an audio sample of their call.
What seems impossible at first becomes a fun game. I have found the best way to learn bird calls is to study in a group and develop odd common stories that connect sound and name. As far as memory goes the more absurd, violent and sexual your associations, the better. I am still not always right, but I will get a decent educated guess.
And mother of god, not only did I pass the exam :-) I really enjoyed this last week of birding! My excitment would have nerded me out a year ago: But we saw rare beauties like the crowned eagle, striped kingfisher, Trumpeter hornbills, Arnot's chat, purple heron, the racket-tailed roller and even the impossibly rare Pels fishing owl.
Boy did we see some beautiful flying by black-chested snake-eagles. And wow did I get excited and rude when I saw a Lanner falcon.
BUT I am still looking for another lifer (bird you have never seen) - for more than a year I have been searching everywhere for my peregrine falcon - the fastest animal in the world as it crash dives into other birds at >330 km/h, effectively disintegrating them only to then catch and devour them in the air.