Birding, like life, is full of all these little details that may make no difference at all, or may make a very big difference. One detail I suggest you pay attention to, when it comes to birding, is your hat.
There’s a whole book called Good Birders Don’t Wear White for a good reason. White is a rare color in nature, except in a snowy landscape, and white therefore stands out from just about any kind of vegetation or terrain. When you are birding, I often say, you are hunting, and birds do not want to be close to you. White calls attention to your presence—especially if it is on your head. It may not matter much in open environments, especially at the beach which is a pretty bright place anyway, but it sure matters in the woods.
The photo accompanying this article was taken in the Peruvian jungle. The individual on the right is wearing an off-white Tilly hat, and happens to be standing in a rare patch of deep-jungle sunshine. Look what the camera shows—that white hat turns into a blaze, admittedly exaggerated because it is overexposed in the photo, but you can bet those tropical birds can see the bright spot and will react to it.
The individual on the left has a bicolored baseball hat, light tan in the front and brown in the back. Not such a bad color scheme, except imagine him turning his head from side to side—the effect in the jungle was like a police strobe, light-dark-light-dark with every turn of his head.
One of the main reasons a dull-colored hat is so important is because our head is probably the body part that moves most often when we are birding—we cock it at the slightest sound, and turn it rapidly when we pick up a flash of movement. That flash of movement may well be a bird that in turn picks up the bigger flash from a white hat, and makes itself scarce as a result!
My choice of hats for most birding, if I wear one at all, is a Cape May Bird Observatory baseball cap in the browns and greens of the Realtree camouflage pattern. For winter, a black knit cap works just fine.