Birding is a hearing based activity, not binoculars based. (1 Viewer)

Two very different interests, Census work versus Study work.

If you're counting and noticing, especially in woods of decent density, auditory is key.
You don't have time for the one when you're counting the many.
Birdwatchers = BirdSurveyors + BirdStudiers.

I spend most of time watching these nuthatches and that woodpecker and those grey jays cooperate to
work this bark/bug assault, that feeder, and those ground bugs all together, and the sentry role for
tracking that hawk and fake-spooking that black squirrel.....how they know a fake alarm from a real one.
They have a very complicated tactical scheme.


I have excellent hearing but poor direction-finding.
I have a follow-on for the brim-based observation:
focusing on one sound is much more a matter of suppressing other sounds than pointing (for the ear).
Some sort of earmuff with a hole in the middle might give better signal processing. Many of the distracting
sounds make 'surface waves' crawling along your head surface.
More experiments to do

Alexis Powell said:

I don't know if this applies to you, but I learned a long time ago that my locating ability is thrown off considerably when wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which I do nearly all the time while birding. When I really need to locate a bird accurately by ear, the hat comes off.

--AP

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That's probably not helping me I'm sure. I wear my wide brimmed hat
in warm and hot weather. In cold weather I have either a hood over my head
or a warm hat. I need my hats though...in the hot weather to protect
my fair skin from the sun and to keep warm in fall/winter. I don't think I'd
do much better locating birds without the hat. I was told as a child I have
some hearing loss in both ears. Certain higher pitches I can't hear and when the sound
bounces off of trees and other close objects I get lost.

Highway Dog said:

Now that I have been on two bird counts, associated with expert birders in the local club, I have found that most assessment, locating, and identification is done by hearing and not by binoculars. I started this hobby because I love using binoculars. Now it seems that this birding is not primarily about visual details of birds. Birding has betrayed me. What will I do with my binoculars if birding is not a binoculars sport?

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HD,

I didn't read all of the posts responding to yours yet but I did want to comment on your original post.

I have been left with much the same feeling on more than one occasion. One of the primary reasons that I became involved in birding was my fascination with sport optics. The two are inevitably intermeshed in my mind. However, I have gone out on several birding excursions with experienced birders who simply make an ID based on the bird's call...and I am not talking about an American Crow or a Belted Kingfisher but rather warbler calls.

More power to them. I don't see myself ever following that route as it would take some of the fun out of the way I bird.

Just my opinion.

FrankD said:

However, I have gone out on several birding excursions with experienced birders who simply make an ID based on the bird's call...and I am not talking about an American Crow or a Belted Kingfisher but rather warbler calls.

More power to them. I don't see myself ever following that route as it would take some of the fun out of the way I bird.

Just my opinion.

Click to expand...

I'm a bit lazy when it comes to learning the bird songs and calls. I know the common ones, but beyond that I check birdjam when I get home after out bird watching. I have a poor memory which doesn't help. It's overwhelming and difficult to learn all of those calls and many species can have very similar calls. I am awed when someone has amazing visual and auditory ID skills. Along with talent, they put the time in; nose in books, online info and listen to recordings repeatedly. I do my reading and listening to the recordings when I can, but not nearly enough. I am just too pooped out after coming home at 8pm each night after work to do much and on the weekends there's only so much time. Wish I could be retired ! :flyaway:

Annabeth2 said:

I'm a bit lazy when it comes to learning the bird songs and calls. I know the common ones, but beyond that I check birdjam when I get home after out bird watching. I have a poor memory which doesn't help. It's overwhelming and difficult to learn all of those calls and many species can have very similar calls. I am awed when someone has amazing visual and auditory ID skills. Along with talent, they put the time in; nose in books, online info and listen to recordings repeatedly. I do my reading and listening to the recordings when I can, but not nearly enough. I am just too pooped out after coming home at 8pm each night after work to do much and on the weekends there's only so much time. Wish I could be retired ! :flyaway:

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Beth

Somebody said, a long time ago, probably about building the Pyramids of Egypt, but it applies to learning 'all those bird calls and songs': all jobs are do-able if you break the job down into do-able pieces.

In my first year as a birder I think I saw about 5 species singing that I could identify by plumage. Armed with the identification and half a memory of what the call or song sounded like, I played a recording of those 5 species until I had learned them. Just those 5, no more. And wow it was a real thrill to walk through a wood and hear 2 or 3 of those 5 and to know what was there without having to see them.

And over the winter I forgot 3 of the songs and needed to listen to the recording again the following spring but that was OK and I decided to learn another 5 songs that second year and so on.

Baby steps.

Lee

Troubador said:

Beth

Somebody said, a long time ago, probably about building the Pyramids of Egypt, but it applies to learning 'all those bird calls and songs': all jobs are do-able if you break the job down into do-able pieces.

In my first year as a birder I think I saw about 5 species singing that I could identify by plumage. Armed with the identification and half a memory of what the call or song sounded like, I played a recording of those 5 species until I had learned them. Just those 5, no more. And wow it was a real thrill to walk through a wood and hear 2 or 3 of those 5 and to know what was there without having to see them.

And over the winter I forgot 3 of the songs and needed to listen to the recording again the following spring but that was OK and I decided to learn another 5 songs that second year and so on.

Baby steps.

Lee

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True...I could stand to be a little more organized how I approach it.

I still have to get to my basic ornithology book to refresh info that fell
out of my head since I took the Cornell home-study course 3-4 yrs ago.

This may sound odd, but it really seems to work: if I watch a bird singing, preferably with a good view and for a longer time period, the song sinks in and I learn it better. Somehow the sight and sound get linked up in the brain and together that makes ID's easier.

Recordings alone don't seem to work as well.

Mark

Kammerdiner said:

This may sound odd, but it really seems to work: if I watch a bird singing, preferably with a good view and for a longer time period, the song sinks in and I learn it better. Somehow the sight and sound get linked up in the brain and together that makes ID's easier.

Recordings alone don't seem to work as well.

Mark

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oh yes, I've noticed that too and have the same experience...it usually sinks in much better.

Annabeth2 said:

...It's overwhelming and difficult to learn all of those calls and many species can have very similar calls. I am awed when someone has amazing visual and auditory ID skills. Along with talent, they put the time in; nose in books, online info and listen to recordings repeatedly...

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I'll second Kammerdiner's experience.

It's a very rare day when I go birding anywhere in eastern North America and hear a bird (by song, call, even many chip notes) that I can't ID (or at least narrow to a very small set of possibilities). How did I get to this point? I think I've done a lot of all the usual things--listening to recordings, reading about vocalizations and how to learn them etc--but I can tell you that for me, the trick (i.e. by far most successful strategy) was to learn them through my own birding experience. Starting early in my birding "career", my mode was to go out and try to ID every bird I found, and since a large percentage were first detected by ear, I spent a lot of time listening to birds in the course of the "hunt" (i.e. trying to find them visually to make the ID). I discovered (in hind sight) that when I found a bird by ear, then labored to find it visually (sometimes very time intensive in brush and woodland settings), that I stood a very good chance of remembering it, unlike when studying songs through recordings and instructional materials. I'm sure that engaging the latter materials facilitated my field learning by teaching me helpful tips for how to "hear" (bring to consciousness, critical/analytical awareness) bird vocalizations, but even today I find that there is nothing quite like hunting down the source of a bird sound for connecting that sound foreverafter to a particular species in my head.

Another happy discovery was that the more songs/calls/etc I learned, the easier it was to learn new ones, as I had a growing library in my mind to which to make comparisons. And many birds sound similar to their relatives, making it easier to quickly assimilate new species. Having developed a mental library, I can _now_ make much better use of sound recordings for learning unfamiliar vocalizations, such as when preparing for a trip to a place I've never been before. For me, it's been a sort of snowball effect rather than a situation where my mind can hold no more.

I hope my experience encourages you and others not to give up, even if you've not been successful trying to learn from recordings.

--AP

Kammerdiner said:

This may sound odd, but it really seems to work: if I watch a bird singing, preferably with a good view and for a longer time period, the song sinks in and I learn it better. Somehow the sight and sound get linked up in the brain and together that makes ID's easier.

Recordings alone don't seem to work as well.

Mark

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Mark, Beth and Alex

This is so true. I use hearing aids to allow me to hear high frequencies and my audiologist told me time and again that I should try to see things that make these sounds in order for my brain to learn these sounds again.

It took me a couple of years of listening to Chiff-Chaffs while seeing them sing, before I could begin to reliably hear the song again and there are many more similar examples.

Lee

Kammerdiner said:

This may sound odd, but it really seems to work: if I watch a bird singing, preferably with a good view and for a longer time period, the song sinks in and I learn it better. Somehow the sight and sound get linked up in the brain and together that makes ID's easier.

Recordings alone don't seem to work as well.

Click to expand...

Another one to support this! I think because of this, because you need to find birds and see and hear them simultanously to learn the voices, knowing bird voices is very much connected to knowing the place and its birds well.

I've spend a few years in Vietnam and stalked quite some birds by following unknown sounds, and when after all the effort and sweat and mozzie bites, the bird reveales, the sounds stick. Well, at least for a while. So in forests in Vietnam I can recognize at least a certain percentage of the voices, which helps enourmously to get on the good birds. It also gives me a feeling of knowing the place, of familiarity.

Recently I've been in Nicaragua, all new birds to me. Not less amazing, but being in the forest there and not knowing to place a single noise in this concert (apart from the Oropendula), that really made me feel like a stranger. Seeing the birds is different and more easy, because most new ones are quickly identified with the guide book. Voices not, it needs time out in this habitat.

Also the need of all senses to be focussed to hear, find and see the birds in tropical forests, provides a very intense and enjoyable experience, much more than say, scoping ducks out on the lake in Swiss winter...

That said, seeing the birds still gives me the biggest pleasure. I'm never happy with heard-only birds. We're visual animals after all.

Mark: We tend to avoid pishing, for the most part, and playback is banned completely. If I can ID a bird based upon call and am unable to locate it visually within 1min, I tend to move on. Though pishing may seem harmless, it does alter the natural behavior of the bird. Until there is more data available, I tend to err on the side of caution. That being said, I did take an Audubon tour where the group lead used a playback call for >1min trying to coax out a singing Prothonotary Warbler.

Bob: Well, I didn't get paid specifically for the tours, but tours have been aspects of my paid positions with State and Federal agencies, so yes, I guess I did get paid to lead the tours.

Justin

Annabeth2 said:

That's probably not helping me I'm sure. I wear my wide brimmed hat
in warm and hot weather. In cold weather I have either a hood over my head
or a warm hat. I need my hats though...in the hot weather to protect
my fair skin from the sun and to keep warm in fall/winter. I don't think I'd
do much better locating birds without the hat. I was told as a child I have
some hearing loss in both ears. Certain higher pitches I can't hear and when the sound
bounces off of trees and other close objects I get lost.

Click to expand...

Beth, (and others),

Out here a wide brimmed hat is de rigueur no matter what the skin type - in midsummer you can feel, and almost smell and see! uncovered skin sizzling ! :stuck: :C :-@ :eek!:

If the hat is in bonce protecting mode, then yes sounds from above can bounce off and be difficult to locate. Turn that frown upside down! |:d| and use it to your advantage .... simply briefly tilt the wide brimmed hat back on your head when trying to locate a sound - and voilà! - your own "bat ears, or "owl facial disk", or "harrier's facial ruff" !! Totes Amazeballs !!! Rather than a hinderance, it's actually a help! :t: you can then pivot around to locate the sound ..... whether or not you want to make little mechanical whirring and stop/start hydraulic and clunking noises as you do so, or echo style pings, is entirely up to you - and how much you'd like to freak out /entertain those around you, or just for the sheer amusement of yourself! :-O

I also agree that watching a birds' behaviour while it sings is a great way to connect the two and file away in the memory banks. We are blessed to have the Superb Lyrebird here, and that makes sound recognition all the more important, as you can be watching one bird, but hear ~50 calls if you are lucky! :king: Other imitators throughout the world would bring similar challenges and joy - (if not quite as superb! )

Please also note that it is not just bird "calls" to listen out for - many other "lerp snipping" (spotted pardalotes), "leaf litter scratching" (superb lyrebird), "bark tearing" (crested shrike-tit), etc, sounds, are characteristic give aways to listen out for .... I suppose some of the more famous ones in the world are the "da da da da da da" of your own woodpeckers, or the "drumming" of a nesting palm cockatoo up on Cape York .... I'm sure there are many others too that folks will chime in on .....

As far as winter head wear goes, why not get those wonderful American "ear flap" hats, and redesign them so that the hinged part is vertical, and the ear bits pull out sideways to offer a radar style extension on either side .... again, silly noises optional! ) - must be a massive market among the birders there .... retirement here you come! ) :cat:


Chosun :gh:

jremmons said:

Bob: Well, I didn't get paid specifically for the tours, but tours have been aspects of my paid positions with State and Federal agencies, so yes, I guess I did get paid to lead the tours.

Justin

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It sounds like this duty is somewhere in your "job description" but not a major part of it. As long as you keep the "tourists" generally happy everything will be OK.

Bob

Chosun Juan said:

Beth, (and others),


.... simply briefly tilt the wide brimmed hat back on your head when trying to locate a sound - and voilà! - your own "bat ears, or "owl facial disk", or "harrier's facial ruff" !! Totes Amazeballs !!! Rather than a hinderance, it's actually a help! :t: you can then pivot around to locate the sound ..... whether or not you want to make little mechanical whirring and stop/start hydraulic and clunking noises as you do so, or echo style pings, is entirely up to you - and how much you'd like to freak out /entertain those around you, or just for the sheer amusement of yourself! :-O


As far as winter head wear goes, why not get those wonderful American "ear flap" hats, and redesign them so that the hinged part is vertical, and the ear bits pull out sideways to offer a radar style extension on either side .... again, silly noises optional! ) - must be a massive market among the birders there .... retirement here you come! ) :cat:


Chosun :gh:

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good idea CJ (about the wide brimmed hat).

I do have a Columbia ear flap hat for winter ! I've been using it
for 2 yrs now...it's a good one.

Annabeth2 said:

good idea CJ (about the wide brimmed hat).

I do have a Columbia ear flap hat for winter ! I've been using it
for 2 yrs now...it's a good one.

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Seriously Beth! Redesign an ear flap winter hat so that the ear flaps open outwards sideways (vertically hinged at the rear) like a radar - I'm sure they could be folded up at the rear when not in use and secured the same way the normal ones are (press studs, velcro, or whatever) etc .... I just know this is your calling .... You can do it! :t: |:d|


Chosun :gh:

Kammerdiner said:

This may sound odd, but it really seems to work: if I watch a bird singing, preferably with a good view and for a longer time period, the song sinks in and I learn it better. Somehow the sight and sound get linked up in the brain and together that makes ID's easier.

Recordings alone don't seem to work as well.

Mark

Click to expand...

Cornell agrees...
http://biology.allaboutbirds.org/bird-song-hero/

Pileatus said:

Cornell agrees...
http://biology.allaboutbirds.org/bird-song-hero/

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I'm not sure if he pioneered it, but Donald Kroodsma has long advocated spectrograms for learning bird songs. I've read two of his books, The Singing Life of Birds and Birdsong by the Seasons (both focused on North America). They come with CD's and together with the spectrograms it's supposed to help. Cornell's Bird Song Hero looks pretty neat. Takes it to the next level.

I often sort of draw "spectrograms" in in my notes, along with the song transcribed into English as best I can. That helps.

As an aside, I went birding once with one of Kroodsma's former grad students who of course researched birdsong, warblers mostly. He was no older than I yet already had significant hearing loss. I was calling out birds by ear, and there he was cupping his ears and missing them. The cruel irony of that stuck with me.

Not odd

Kammerdiner said:

This may sound odd, but it really seems to work: if I watch a bird singing, preferably with a good view and for a longer time period, the song sinks in and I learn it better. Somehow the sight and sound get linked up in the brain and together that makes ID's easier.

Recordings alone don't seem to work as well.

Mark

Click to expand...

Mark

there is nothing odd about it. It is an established fact from didactics and brain research that it's easier to memorize anything if the input is on various "channels" of perception. This is very useful for learning vocabulary for instance: If you don't just read the word, but see a picture that represents the term, usually this helps in memorizing. Also you may have noticed that a word or phrase from a foreign language will stick in your memory much more reliably if you've heard it in a real situation …. that's the same principle.

Our brain is very different from a computer, it works by a network of associations not by fixed contents that have a definite storage place and an address by which they can be found. The more associations, the better it sticks in your memory and the easier you can access the info.

Another aspect: When learning something, we all know that passive reception doesn't nearly bring the same results as active performance. (There is a saying, apparently by some ancient philosopher: Explain to me and I'll forget. Show me and I'll understand. Let me do it and I'll learn it.)
Now how can we make use of that in the given context? Don't just hear a bird song over and over again, but repeat it. Aloud, if you feel up to it - or simply by repeating it in your mind. I admit that I am a sloppy dog when it comes to bird ID and so I've never really bothered too much about the songs (I know a golden oriole by its song, though ….), but I do use this technique when trying to memorize feather details …. and I tell myself it works.

More could be said about but I hate reading ream-long posts so I suppose others don't like them either.

Elu

See you ...

dalat said:

That said, seeing the birds still gives me the biggest pleasure. I'm never happy with heard-only birds. We're visual animals after all.

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Florian

it's the same with me. I'd go as far to compare it to our interhuman relations. Talking to someone on the phone is one thing, "seeing" him, that is acutally meeting him is another (even if you don't do anything than sitting there and talking which you could likewise on the phone ....)

Elu