Another interesting variant of this description practice was tried at a
Los Angeles Audubon meeting a decade or so ago. Someone brought in an
unusual bird (my memory places it as an exotic finch of some sort), people
sat
and looked at it a while and took notes, then the bird was removed. Then
the fun began-what color was its eye? toes? Was the tail longer or
shorter than the wings? Answers for these went all over the map. It
can be very humbling to screw these things up at captive short range.
But this can be a quite instructive exercise even on a quick trip to a
pet store: can you describe a bird in writing carefully enough so that
someone else can find the same bird?
-Jim Neitzel, The Evergreen State College