LBJs and other Birding Challenges
When I first started learning to identify birds, I heard a lot about “LBJs” from veteran birders, but they didn’t mean former President Lyndon B. Johnson! For birders, LBJs means “little brown jobs” and is the nickname for the many birds in the sparrow family so similar that it can be very difficult to tell apart even when you have time to get a good look at them. The very first time I visited Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge in 1993, I was pretty overwhelmed by the number of LBJs I saw along the Cienega and Arivaca Creek trails, and in the areas around the refuge headquarters. I wondered how I could possibly ever learn to be able to identify them, and in all the years afterward, I have met a whole lot of birders who feel similarly challenged despite being much more experienced than I. It wasn’t too hard for me to learn the most common species in Western Washington urban and suburban habitats, because many have a distinct identifying f...