Purpose of the gallery

6^th March, 2022

Česká verze zde (Czech version): Účel této galerie

There are three main objectives, or goals, of this gallery:

To help ornithologists, bird ringers and birdwatchers in sexing and ageing birds they might encounter during their research or leisure activities. I hope photos in this gallery could be used as a complementary aid when reading about ageing or sexing techniques in bird ringing books. In this case, photos might be sometimes more illustrative than a plain text or black and white drawings.
One of the objectives is also “just” to show the great variability wild birds exhibit. Not only the interspecific variability in colour and shape but also the intraspecific variability. It is not surprising that a blackbird looks different than a finch but it is the variability within a species that is interesting and that surprises many people. I would like to capture on photos not only the ordinary looking birds but also the more rare ones as well as rare cases of moult.
Which brings me to the third objective – as moult is a topic which interests me much I am also building a database of “moults”. I try to capture the variability of moult patterns within species which can be used as a base of some scientific discoveries, albeit small ones. I have already written some articles about ageing and sexing of birds which have brought something novel to this field of ornithology.

Anyway, I hope you find this gallery useful! In case you would find some mistake in the gallery, please let me know.

N.B.: I hope it is clear to everyone that all the photographed birds were trapped during ringing sessions with all the appropriate permissions and only by trained professionals (mostly me and my wife). All the birds were then released back to the wild at the place of their capture.

Can I use photos from the gallery?

All the photos in the gallery are licensed with a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 ) which means that you can use the photos in your project as long as you clearly attribute their source, it is not a commercial project and your project is shared under a similar free license (see the link above for more details).

In case you find the photos in the gallery especially useful and would like to use the originals versions of the photos – without watermark, or you would like to use considerable number of the photos, please let me know. I am very open to any meaningful collaboration!