Identifying what you've seen

A photograph can get you close to an identification, and two public tools do most of that work.

iNaturalist

iNaturalist suggests a species from a photograph you upload, and a community of other recorders can then confirm or correct that suggestion. The first answer is a computer-generated guess, so it can be wrong, particularly on species with close look-alikes; the community check is what turns a guess into something more dependable, and only once someone with the right experience has looked at it.

Field Studies Council

The Field Studies Council publishes identification guides and keys covering UK wildlife, built to walk you through the features that separate one species from another. That makes them slower to use than a photo tool, but the reasoning behind the answer is laid out for you to follow and check yourself, which a photo match does not give you.

Used together, a photo suggestion and a printed or digital key cover most of what an identification from a single photograph can settle. Where a group is trickier, on habits, size or features that a key alone cannot separate, the UK species groups pages give the wider picture of what to expect in the UK.

A bird calling from cover, or a song you can hear but not place, is a different problem from a bird you got a good look at. Two public tools split that difference between them.

From a sound recording

BirdNET, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, identifies a bird from a sound recording. It works from the pattern of the call itself, so a phone recording made from a garden or a hedge line is usually enough to get a suggestion. Like any automated identifier it can get the call wrong, particularly where two species sound close or the recording is faint or mixed with other noise, so treat its answer as a starting point rather than a confirmed record.

From what you saw

The RSPB's bird identifier works the other way round, building an identification from what you actually saw: size, colour, markings, where it was and what it was doing. It suits a sighting with no recording at all, but it depends on how much detail you noticed and can only narrow things down as far as your description allows.

Used together, a recording and a description of what you saw can point to the same answer from two directions, which is a reasonable way to be more confident before you note it down. Once you have a name, you can check what else has been recorded nearby on the places pages, or see where the species sits among the wider species groups covered here.

A photo, a call or a set of features can narrow a species down, but a second check against what other people have actually recorded nearby is worth doing before you settle on an answer. The NBN Atlas, the National Biodiversity Network's public record of UK wildlife sightings, publishes an explore-your-area page for exactly this.

NBN Atlas: explore your area

Enter a place and the explore-your-area page shows what has been recorded near it, drawn from the wider records held in the NBN Atlas. If the species you think you have found has been recorded close by before, that supports the identification; if it has not, it is worth a second look, since plenty of real sightings go unrecorded in any one place.

Records in the Atlas come from many different recording schemes and observers, at different levels of scrutiny, so treat a match or a gap as a piece of evidence to weigh. Used alongside a photo identification or a guide, it is a straightforward way to test whether an identification fits what is known about that species' range.