User:Sabine's Sunbird/Writing Bird Articles
Writing articles on birds can be a daunting process. There is often a lot of information out there, much of which can be contradictory or confusing. Existing articles that you want to improve can be haphazardly arranged leaving you little idea how to progress. So what is a keen student of ornithology to do? Well, I'm here to help you on the basics of writing a good article about birds, starting with the basics and working towards the finer details. I'll mostly be avoiding the stuff covered in other tutorials in the Wiki proper, technical details about how to cite or the correct way to dot i's. I'll be dealing with the particulars about writing about birds (and for that matter other animals).
Choose your subject
An important place to start; what are you going to write about? This is more important that you think. Taking on just any bird article can be hard, some may lack sufficient info to make a good article out of. Others may be fiendishly complex. A good rule of thumb for a first time good article writer is too pick a species, not a family, genus or order. Higher order taxa articles badly need work but are much harder to write, as you have to balance the article to cover the whole family when info may only be available for a few species. This is particularly true where some species arefound in the first world and others in the third world. You'll also find yourself typing "birds in the family x all do y, exception for exceptions a,b and c, which do z" and "some frigatebirds do this" and "most bango-birds sound like bangos" over and over and over which gets old very fast. Species, on the other hand, tend to be more conducive to sweeping statements like "Lesser Bango-birds live in Armenia and eat frogs and sound like a bango". Individual species can be tricky in situations where the taxonomy is disputed, you might find that you are writing about a species that is about to be split into three species, so try and write about a stable species. The people at WP:BIRD can help you with information about the likelihood of a split.
Do a search of Google and Google Scholar to see if there are lots of references to work with. Species found in the Americas will often have lots of journal articles that are available for free on a website called SORA, so search there too. And of course you can raid the library or your own bookshelves for information too. We keep list of information sources on our main page to help you.