Beginner's Guide

Learning to identify flowers, trees, birds or butterflies 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. The month by month sections on this site (see the blue button menu above) go into more detail, 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 barrier 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. 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 and there seems to be far too much information to absorb. As you go on, the possible identifications for a particular item start to narrow.

Smartphone apps speed the identification process - in the old days you had no choice but to thumb through a reference book - but you still need to take the time to stop and consult them. 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. Identify one thing, then look out for other examples on your walks for the next week or two.

It is also useful to identify things in your neighbourhood - in a park or green space where you walk. That way you can watch how things change as the seasons progress. This is a particularly useful thing to do with trees and shrubs - see below.

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.

• Smartphones really help in identification, because it is easy enough to take a photograph and try and identify it later. Both Google and Apple phones now have features where you can identify a flower directly from a photo. For a more sophisticated version of this you can upload your photos to apps such as Plantnet or iNaturalist enable you to upload a photo and have it matched to existing photographs. These are quite reliable these days, but sometimes they throw up strange identifications. It is always useful to google the name they supply (ideally the Latin one) and see if they throw up other images of the same plant. If you have a particularly puzzling flower to identify, try posting it to a specialist social media group or to iSpot.


• When identifying flowers, it 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 the blue button menu at top of page) are designed to tell you just that.
  


• Identifying the flower in situ is useful, if you can take the time to do it. If you do it later, you may find your photograph lacks critical details - for example, that the only way to tell it from another species is to examine its leaves or their arrangement on the stem.


• Never pick flowers to identify later. It is not only illegal, but it kills that flower. Suppose everyone did it? If you don't have a camera or smartphone with you, the 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.

See here for a guide to walks in the south east featuring particular flowers. And here are some monthly tips:

• JANUARY & FEBRUARY - snowdrop
• MARCH - lesser celandine, daffodil, primrose, wood anemone
• APRIL - as March, plus cuckoo flower, garlic mustard, stitchwort, forget-me-nots, ramsons, and of course bluebells
• MAY - buttercup, oxeye daisy, red campion, cow parsley, germander speedwell
• JUNE - poppy, foxglove, hedge woundwort, sow thistles, hawksbeards, birdsfoot trefoil
• JULY - rosebay willowherb, ragwort, majoram, ladies bedstraw, knapweed, thistles
• AUGUST - yarrow, traveller’s joy, common fleabane, purple loosestrife, field scabious
• SEPTEMBER - as August, plus michelmas daisy

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. 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 you 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:

• FEBRUARY - hazel and alder produce catkins before other trees
• MARCH - cherry plum and forsythia flower, weeping willow leafs, grey and goat willows produce catkins
• APRIL - blackthorn blossoms, hornbeams are a mass of catkins, wild cherry flowers. Most shrubs and trees come into leaf
• MAY - hawthorn blossoms and horse chestnuts flower
• JUNE - elder flowers, as do bramble and 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

Learning birdsong used to be hard, but apps and smartphones have made it much easier. Currently the best tool by far is the Merlin app produced by Cornell Labs in the US, which is loaded with all the sounds produced by all the species you will encounter in the UK. All you have to do with this brilliant app is set it recording the soundscape and wait for it to identify the birds that are singing around you. Even better, it highlights each bird as it is actually in voice, so you can identify what is producing a particular sound. You get a recording of what you have heard which you can play it back at leisure or keep for reference.

Even so, lots of people say they find learning birdsong daunting. When you start, there seems to be undifferentiated twittering all around you and you despair of ever distinguishing one bird from another. But the good news is that there are maybe only 30-40 common songs being sung around you on an average country walk in the south east of England, and many are pretty distinctive.

For example, a song thrush takes one phrase and repeats it three or four times, then does the same to another phrase and another, each phrase being different from the last. No other bird does that. Once you recognise that, identifying song thrushes is easy.

The best way to start with birdsong is to fix on one song in the soundscape around you - something that is distinctive and sticks in your mind - and use Merlin or some other app to identify that. Now you have your first birdsong! Walk around on a few country walks, noticing it whenever you hear it, and saying its name out loud to yourself. Then move onto an another song. Before long, you are easily picking out those sounds from the background noise, and starting to notice other sounds you want to identify.

You can do this anytime in the January to July birdsong season, but absolutely the best time to start is in the winter. This is also a great way to enliven what is otherwise a bleak time of year. In January, just about the only birds that are singing are robins, great tits and blue tits, so this is a great time to learn their song. In February other birds kick in (see list below) so that is a good time to learn them. If you can identify these birds, when the migrants turn up in late March and April their songs will sound new and surprising and you will be keen to know what birds are making them too.

For a guide to what you can hear at each stage of the year, try the book Birdwatching with your eyes closed by Simon Barnes. Or consult the month-by-month bird pages on this website (see blue button menu at the top of this page), which distill all my experience over the years on this topic. Here are a few highlights:

• JANUARY - robins make twittering noises, but great tits dominate with a see-saw call
• FEBRUARY - as January, plus song thrushes, dunnocks, nuthatches, greenfinches and wrens
• MARCH - as February, but blackbirds and chaffinches also get going and, at the end of the month, the distinctive song of the chiffchaff marks the arrival of spring migrants
• APRIL & MAY - birdsong heaven. New arrivals include the blackcap, whitethroat and garden warbler
• JUNE - birdsong becomes more occasional, but there are still lots of different species to hear. Swallows and house martins wheel overhead catching insects
• JULY - silence descends as the mating season ends, but wood pigeons and collared doves keep on calling
• SEPTEMBER - robins start up again, and are the main songsters for the rest of the year
• OCTOBER and beyond - communal birds twitter to each other, especially blue tits

Other resources include RSPB website also has useful bird identifier pages, including brief song clips. For a massive library of bird recordings see www.xeno-canto.org: you can search for any bird here and get multiple recordings of all their songs and calls, including some obscure ones that may not be in the usual guides.

As mentioned above, the great thing about learning birdsong is that it enables you to know what birds are around you in the landscape without ever having to see them. It is like having a sixth sense. That is just as well because actually spotting birds - seeing what they look like and how they behave - is much harder. Against you is the simple fact that if a bird sees you looking at it, its instinct is to immediately fly away (robins, seagulls and pigeons are exceptions to this).

In addition, you absolutely need binoculars of some sort to be able to see birds in any meaningful detail. And those binoculars have to be round your neck as you walk, so that you can bring them up to your eyes quickly: by the time you have fished around in your bag for them, the bird will be long gone.

If you do want to learn to recognise birds by sight, winter and early spring is by far the best time, before foliage comes out on trees and shrubs in late March and April. Even then it can be annoyingly hard to see birds. Goldfinches, for example, can twitter away gaily in tree branches right above your head and yet somehow be almost impossible to spot. Of course, they have evolved this way - to be as invisible as they can be to predators.

For both hearing birdsong and identifying them visually, the best place is in and around suburban gardens, and in nearby wild spaces. The availability of food on bird tables increases the concentration of birds and they break cover in search of it. In rural locations, a mixture of low scrub and taller trees on the edge of open grassy spaces tends to be better for birdsong. By contrast arable fields can be surprisingly empty of avian life, with the exception of large flocks of rooks, jackdaws, pigeons or gulls in winter.

Birdsong is stronger at dawn and dusk, as male birds remind rivals that they are still in possession of their territories: this is one advantage of winter for the birdwatcher, in that it is easier to be up at dawn when days are shorter. In the middle of the day, by contrast, birds are feeding themselves or their young and have less time to sing.

That being said, many birds - for example chaffinches, blackcaps, wrens, chiffchaffs or great tits - do also indulge in formal mating songs by day, and in late April and early May, at least in reasonably wooded areas, it can seem as if blackbirds are singing everywhere, all the time. Outside the mating season, sociable birds like tits and finches also hop around trees feeding and uttering odd snatches of song and contact calls, to reassure others in the group they are there.

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.

Getting started with butterflies

The problem with butterflies is that they are constantly on the move, making it very hard to get a good look at them. This can make them very frustrating to learn and identify. But the good news is that there are only 65 species in the UK, and at least half of these are rare or found only in a few places. Learn to identify 15-20 of the common species, and that will cover all the ones you are likely to see in an average summer. See here for a guide to all the butterflies you can see on walks in the south east.

I found that the key to learning butterflies was to try and photograph them. I used an ordinary pocket camera for this and walked around with it constantly in my hand one summer, snapping every butterfly I could. Once you have a photograph, you can then study the wing markings in detail. In my view binoculars are also indispensable, though a surprisingly large percentage of fervent butterfly spotters don't use them.

While it may initially seem an impossible task to catch butterflies sitting still long enough to be photographed, careful observation will show you that some species - such as commas or red admirals - are often patrolling a particular territory. They have a favourite leaf to which they come back again and again. For other species it is just a matter of being patient. If you see butterflies in an area, sit down and wait, and fairly soon some will land in front of you.

To identify the butterflies you see, you can use the tools on the Butterfly Conservation website, or get the Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Ireland from the Field Studies Council. The latter is a simple three part card that you can easily carry around with you, and which importantly shows all the UK butterflies actual life size and in male and female forms (if they are different). This saves you a lot of time wondering (for example) if you are looking at a meadow brown or a small heath (they have similar underwing markings but are quite different in size).

If you want a book about butterflies, buy the Pocket Guide to the Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland by Richard Lewington. Like the Field Studies Council card, all the illustrations in this book are life size, and - crucially - it only includes butterflies you can see in the UK. Most other butterfly books make up for the small number of UK species by adding lots of European ones - irrelevant and confusing if you are trying to learn the species in this country.

If you have a particularly difficult butterfly (or moth) to identify, try posting a photograph of it to iSpot.

Courses

There is nothing like having expert help to get you started in identifying flowers, trees and birds. It is worth checking out if your local nature reserve (particularly urban ones) are doing any nature identification walks. The following organisations also offer day or weekend courses in this area.

Plantlife: UK charity championing flowers, which holds nature reserves at its reserve in Kent and other locations around the country

Field Studies Council: organises day and weekend courses in identifying flowers, trees and birds at various locations, including Juniper Hall near Box Hill in the North Downs

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has a variety of events at its reserves up and down the country, including some on the identification of common woodland and country species.

© Peter Conway 2009-2025 • All Rights Reserved