There are various ways of doing this. In this blog I am talking about sexing captive-bred falcons.
If your interest is in free-flying, wild, non-captive bred individuals then you will need a good field guide and good binoculars. As to choice of binocular, that really is a personal choice. Recently I was talking to an expert ornithologist demonstrating binoculars and telescopes at a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) nature reserve in Conwy in my native North Wales. He basically said that choice of binocular is less to do with price and more to do with whether the binocular suits your vision.
When I had an agreement with Brazil's federal environment agency to take in and rehabilitate birds of prey part of that agreement involved sexing the birds that were my repsonsibility. It is a fairly invasive process but the ends justify the means. A minimal blood sample is taken from the tip of a talon and placed on special filter paper provided by a comercial laboratory. To the slip of paper is added the bird's ring number and other identification details (species, age) and then an accompanying form is completed and the whole lot popped in an envelope and sent to São Paulo. You get the result over e-mail within days so as to progress your pairings and a very smart certificate several days later. Good for people who are breeding pedigree birds.
That's how I used to do it and I always found the company processed the samples in good time and reliably.
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