NATURE NOTES: BIRD SONG

Attend more. Know more. Care More.

Hummers at full throttle, July 2021.

First, you should thank me for deleting a long preamble where I shared my bird-watching history, bringing you, dear reader, to the present in which I have seen the light (or been enlightened by the sounds) of summer birds, invisible in the leafy trees overhead. You’re welcome.

I have discovered the apps that demystify bird songs and calls, and am paying far more attention to the avian audioscape than I ever have before. That is what I wanted you to know. Advances in machine learning are reaching the end-user in the field. That’s me and you!

Let me not come across as an expert. The first time I made any sustained and purposeful use of this kind of smartphone bird sound recognition was a mere two weeks ago. So this is a recent moment of epiphany and joy of discovery that I must share, and sorry even for the shortened preamble. Here's the skinny:

On a recent calm late-April morning, I set out to meet a neighbor-friend in dense woods, halfway between our places. There were birds calling from all sides. I remembered the recent addition to several birding apps so that sounds could be identified. I had not put that smartphone function to use before. My expectations were low. And behold...

While the app was in RECORD mode, every bird that called over a hundred yards of trail was recorded in sequence, with an accompanying sonogram. As the recording continued, and as each bird called a second time, its name was highlighted in the display so I could pay attention to the call and associate it with that bird species.

I knew these birds, but now can tell sparrows and wrens apart.

More than once, the app popped up the name of a bird that its ears had heard but mine had not. Ovenbird? I didn't hear an ovenbird. But after that, I heard them commonly. The app had prompted me to listen with greater precision and to ATTEND a sound I had simply, until then, ignored. It lowered my threshold of attention and awareness.

► CLICK TO LISTEN to this 41 second recording from the species capture shown above. Turn speakers on and UP.

The education does not stop there. Each of these "sessions" is recorded and can be played back to rehearse and learn those bird sound associations.

Imagine the good use this can be put to--in your own efforts to KNOW YOUR PLACE by knowing the other-than-human companions you have largely ignored. And you can easily make this a family game that engages the kids. I think how much more knowledgeable I would have been as a birder if I'd been paying this kind of digitally-assisted attention to bird ID by sound since my early days.

While this might to some seem a silly waste of time, I would argue otherwise. This is a tool that provides an acoustic lens of awareness to the richness of our living world as we struggle to hold fast to order and well-being. It is imperative that we emerge from the pervasive nature illiteracy that has allowed us to dismiss the unique calls and songs of local birdlife as just so many tweets. Nature apathy is not benign. This new awareness matters.

Becoming more fully aware of a thing creates or adds emphasis to a landmark on our mental map of the world. Such landmarks we regard in nature often lead to admiration and wonder; and that which we admire and appreciate and honor, we will strive to nurture and protect.

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The app I use here is Merlin Bird ID from Cornell. They also offer a bird-sound-ID stand-alone app called BirdNet that I honestly just started checking out. It looks amazing—a research-grade tool that is tapped into tons of additional web-based resources—a different bird than Merlin.