Ecosystem services (ES) are increasingly incorporated into management of marine and coastal resources. Local investigations of generation and utilization of ES are desirable but may be costly, highlighting a need to develop general tools helping to predict the ES associated with a particular resource or site. Functional guilds or trait-based approaches have been suggested as one way to predict the capacity to deliver desired ES. We assess the ES provided by six species, from pairs of two ecologically similar species in each of the families Anatidae, Alcidae and Phalacrocoracidae, and selected to show the applicability and limitations of such approaches applied to marine birds. The set of ES, interactions between them and differences between populations, are examined for each species. This helps to reveal when the characteristics of ES can be predicted based on knowledge from elsewhere or similar species, or when the local context needs to be analyzed. Our findings suggest that services more closely linked to ecological processes, which include many regulating and supporting services, are often similar within functional guilds. We also find that including breeding habits when defining guilds increases the general applicability of the concept. Cultural services, and services linked to local and scientific knowledge, depend to large extents on local context, on the other hand. This complicates the process of generalizing results regarding interactions and trade-offs between ES for species or populations that make significant contributions to substantially different kinds of services.