NOT EVERY BIRD lives up to its name. The tit isn’t always titillating, nor the hobby a hobby at all. But some names don’t live up to their birds, either. The Plain-throated Sunbird is the rather uninspiring English name for a little avian gem, at least in the case of the male.

Some 14 centimeters long with a slender, down-curved bill typical of Sunbirds, the male Plain-throated has a bright yellow belly, dark upper parts with green and violet iridescence and a metallic-purple border to that plain throat. The female is, as usual amongst Sunbirds, much dowdier. The Plain-throated Sunbird can be found in woodland, bush, parks, gardens and mangroves and has a range extending from Burma (we should now say Myanmar) south through Thailand and Malaysia and east across Indonesia and the Philippines.

Thanks to the wonders of digital technology, I confirmed my first ever Plain-throated Sunbird last week in Garden City.

Backtrack to mid-July when I found myself ambling round the lush tropical gardens of the Sultan of Johor on the southernmost tip of Peninsular Malaysia. A stiff breeze blowing in off the Straits of Johor alleviated the sticky, tropical heat. The air was full of incomprehensible chatter from unfamiliar birds, flitting cryptically through the canopy.

To my massive consternation I had no field guide, just an out-of-date checklist to the birds of neighboring Singapore, so putting names to these alien twitterings was proving nearly impossible. All I could do was fill my notebook with as thorough a collection of scrawls and sketches as possible, in the hope that at some point I could sit down with the proper literature.

A Sunbird appeared on a lavishly blossomed heliconia, and I noted the details: yellow belly, iridescence, short tail and bill shape. Whipping out the digital camera, I got a couple of shots before it flitted off. Sunbirds do not stay still.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I am back in Cairo. Manned with my notebook and Sunbirds by Cheke, Mann and Allen — the book on the world’s sunbirds — I am trying to work out precisely which of the some 120 species of sunbird I have seen. My notes tell me the bird I sighted was glossed metallic on upper parts, crown and throat, but none of the species in the book matches my description exactly.

Then, I remember my digital camera. I find the image, which is distinctly unhelpful. It is a fine shot of a group of Heliconia flower heads, but the sunbird is disappointingly small and featureless. Then, I zoom in, and the bird explodes from dot to frame-filler. Now, I can see where I went wrong with the throat. There is a band of metallic purple running down the side of the throat but the throat itself is, well, plain.

Two weeks and several thousand miles from the initial encounter, I confirm I have seen a Plain-throated Sunbird.

This was not my first ‘technology tick’. In spring 2000, I was south of Marsa Alam with a group of naturalist friends, surveying a series of mangrove swamps along the coast. One of our group spots a warbler amongst the dense foliage and comments that it looks like an Olivaceous Warbler, a common breeding species, but seems ‘odd.’ Eight pairs of binoculars home in on the dull gray-brown bundle of feathers hopping around the greenery.

This is truly this bird’s 15 minutes of fame. For more than a quarter-hour, it hops in and out of view, showing fleeting glimpses of possible ID features. Was that a pale wing panel? How strong is the contrast with the primaries — and does that bill look a little stout for an Olivaceous? Could we be seeing an Upcher’s Warbler, an altogether much rarer species in Egypt? Possibly, but not definitely.

Back in Cairo, I received an email with a series of digital images attached that a member of our party had taken. Now, with the image filling the screen and the bird frozen, rather than constantly flitting in and out of view, the identification could be confirmed. Yes, there was a pale wing panel formed by the pale edges to the secondaries, and they did contrast with the primaries. The bill did seem too stout for an Olivaceous, and the tail was right. We had a rare Upcher’s Warbler.

The digital camera is emerging as an important piece of equipment for the field naturalist with as many different uses as the user has ideas. But that does not mean we should throw away our notebooks and stop sketching. Technology is certainly an important additional tool in our campaigns for correct identification, but it should not become the only tool.

In both the examples cited above, the digital camera would never even have been used if the observers had not realized they were seeing something different, an odd Olivaceous or suspect sunbird. That knowledge only comes from experience in the field with the bird, mammal, dragonfly — or whatever — right in front of you. This experience is the only way to become aware of what is called in naturalist parlance ‘jizz.’

Jizz is the collection of definable and indefinable characteristics — visual, behavioral or vocal — that go together to give a species its particular character. With experience and familiarity it is possible to identify by jizz alone and, perhaps more important, to know when something is different and possibly new and exciting. Then whip out the digital!

On a more somber note, there is the tragedy unfolding on a daily basis in nearby Lebanon. The human cost is what makes the news, and all of us are familiar with the horrific images beamed into our living rooms hour after hour. With so much human misery on all sides it might seem insensitive to remind that there are environmental consequences of this conflict too – but they are in their own way just as important and certainly have long-term implications. Just think back to the eco-carnage perpetrated by Saddam Hussein on Kuwait and indeed his own Marsh Arabs.

In the middle of July, the Israelis bombed Jiyyeh power station 30 kilometers south of Beirut. The result was the initial release of 10,000 tons of heavy fuel oil into the Mediterranean that, at the time of writing, has formed a slick along 150 kilometers of coastline. With further spillage, estimates now range between 20,000 and 30,000 tons of total oil released, the equivalent of a fully laden tanker sinking.

The environmental tragedy encompasses damage to local fisheries, the destruction of tourism — not that many people are lying on Beirut’s beaches these days — and the long-term implications for the eco-system. But most poignantly, July is the month when the endangered Green Turtle’s eggs hatch on the breeding beaches, and the young scramble down the sand, running a gauntlet of predators, to the safety of the ocean. This year off the coast of Lebanon the hatchlings were more likely to find themselves in a cloying soup of crude oil rather than open ocean with possibly dire consequences for their future in the region.

In 1993, one of my first years in Egypt, I attended a conference in Sharm El-Sheikh (when Sharm still had charm) and listened to a presentation by biologists from the American University in Beirut. They described how, through all the turmoil and tragedy of the Civil War, they had kept a nest-box project for birds up and running in the deserted campus. With such environmental tenacity, perhaps there may be hope for Lebanon’s turtles after all. et