As well as many books, there are many, many websites to help with identification, some more useful than others. Here are some that we have found helpful. If you have a favourite that we’ve not mentioned, please let us know.
iSpot – where you can upload photos of plants or animals and someone, somewhere, will usually identify them for you, often in a few minutes! Other people can then agree or suggest alternatives. I have found it particularly helpful with strange insects, where I otherwise have no idea where to start looking. Highly recommended.
Wild about Britain is good too, but so wide-ranging that I find it very easy to get distracted – but great if you’ve got time to spare. I read a wonderful blog on here all about kingfishers, that was totally gripping. There are threads to follow on just about anything to do with wildlife, and many people very happy to help you identify what you have seen.
Identifying birds: the RSPB site is easy to navigate and includes recordings of bird songs too, and the BTO site has loads of useful information too, including bird ID workshop videos for sorting out similar pairs of birds.
New! Bird identification training website – it is Norwegian, but it is set up so that you can just be tested on, eg, UK birds. You can either do photos, or sounds – the sounds one is pretty tough! If you want to, you can even do an official online test and get a t-shirt if you do well enough. A good way to practise identifying birds. It kept asking me about tricky gulls and ducks, so I had to get a book out – but I now know what a shelduck looks like. Maybe. It looks as though they are planning to add mammals and tracks to the site later.
Identifying butterflies: Butterfly Conservation Warwickshire – particularly useful as the information is specific to Warwickshire
Identifying moths: UK Moths
A useful page about relatively-easy-to-identify bees, wasps and ants (not that easy though!)
Kineton Wildlife 