Hawks & Eagles
Class Aves. Egg-laying vertebrates with feathers and wings. Generally agreed to be descended from theropod dinosaurs.
A group of diurnal raptors (i.e., day-flying meat-eating birds with hooked bills and strong talons)
Swimming birds with webbed feet (front-facing toes only); some have a horizontally-flattened bill; many are highly social and vocal, with a hornlike call. Subfamilies within anserinae are controversial, but all the photos I've taken so far are of birds in the two most-accepted subfamilies.
Click image for Anatidae page
Very long-necked, straight-billed, swimming predatory birds related to cormorants
Long-billed, often long-legged and long-necked, predatory wading birds
Click image for Ardeidae page
A family of medium-sized, thick-billed, seed-eating birds. Includes a few "grosbeaks", "finches" and "buntings", though those names are also used for other families.
Family Charadriidae includes plovers and lapwings. They have short bills, and feed by sight in quick pecks, rather than probing blindly the way most sandpipers do.
There isn't a real distinction between a "pigeon" and a "dove".
Doves are adaptible birds, easily tamed yet often going feral. Some have excellent homing instincts, making them useful as messengers. Like all birds, they are edible, which is why the two most famous pigeon species are now extinct: the dodo (since 1662), and the passenger pigeon (since 1914).
Family Corvidae includes crows, ravens, choughs, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, treepies, and nutcrackers.
Generally large birds (by songbird standards), corvids are often loud, unafraid of humans, and aggressive toward other birds and toward potential predators. Many will take food from humans (whether offered freely or not), and some also steal shiny objects. Some species are highly social, others are territorial, and some guard a feeding territory during the day but join a communal roost at night.
Corvid species are frequently mentioned among the most intelligent birds, having demonstrated self-recognition, tool-making, and problem-solving abilities. A recent study demonstrated that crows can recognize individual human faces, but I am unaware of any human ever being able to recognize an individual crow (unless the crow had a scar or similar marking).
A surefire way to identify a corvid is to look closely at the top of its beak: corvids have bristly feathers that extend forward over their nostrils. To varying degrees, corvids also all have sturdy beaks, a harsh, dissonant voice (though some are good mimics), and a tendency to walk, not hop, when on the ground.
Small songbirds that look like, but are not related to, European sparrows.
A family of small birds with very thick, short bills for cracking seeds. Their nests are roofed over.
A group of medium-size, mostly-black (the males that is), loud songbirds. Note that not all "blackbirds" are related.
Large, aggressive, noisy coastal birds with webbed feet. Some live nearly 50 years, and take three or four years to reach maturity. Most are indiscriminate eaters. Species are often hard to tell apart, with variable coloration, plumage that changes with maturity, and widespread hybridization.
Medium-sized, long-tailed birds, some of which have a habit of imitating the songs of other birds, and any other sounds they hear.
Stiff-billed birds that can hammer through bark and wood to find insects, and also to excavate a nesting cavity, or just to make noise to attract a mate. Most have very long, prehensile tongues which allow them to capture insects underneath bark even if they do not drill in precisely the right spot, or to scoop up ants from an anthill. To allow tongues to extend up to three times the length of the bill, the hyoid bones in some species are so long they wrap around the back of the skull and all the way to the nostrils. Contrary to popular belief, these elongated hyoids don't seem to be important in absorbing the shocks from hammering into wood. Some of the longest are in flickers, who don't do much hammering.
Woodpeckers are zygodactylous - they have two forward-facing toes and two backward-facing toes, enabling them to perch upside-down or sideways.
Large swimming birds with long necks and narrow, hooked bills.
Birds with strong, hooked beaks. Mostly large, colorful, noisy, and gregarious. They are zygodactilic (two toes point backwards), and often maintain a nearly vertical posture when perched. Some eat mostly seeds and fruit (as you'd guess from the bill) but lories eat a lot of nectar, which they lap up with their furry tongues.
Birds with non-webbed feet, often found in water; often poor fliers
This family includes American "Robins" (not related to European robins which are flycatchers, muscicapidae) and European blackbirds (not related to American blackbirds (icterids)).
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None of the Above
