WARBLINGS
I think it’s helpful when you are trying to learn something new, to hear from others who are right there with you, who may be innovating what’s being taught, who inspire you to get out there and try again, who have something cheeky to say, who help create a sense of community through their actions.
These are the WARBLINGS!
Please welcome today’s WARBLER and student of Bird Mentor’s ~ Bird Song Course, Willem van Vliet
Learning about Bird Voices: “Tweet — repeat, repeat, repeat!”
Having always considered myself utterly tone deaf, the distorted tune test on the website of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders recently instilled a ray of hope in me. I may not be a total basket case. So, I welcomed the short Song Bird course. It was fun and offered many useful guidelines from which I hope to benefit.
Reflecting on my own experience as someone who recently and casually came to birding, one thing that stands out in my mind is the importance of repetition, for lack of a better word. Starting to record occasional observations last spring, my main knowledge of birds was related to size. I preferred the bigger birds. Easier to see. I had the hardest time distinguishing between all the little ones. But it somehow became a challenge. Initially, they all seemed to look alike. Take the juncos. While they all flock together, they’re not all of the same feather, so my field guide said. But I found it tough to tell them apart from one another, especially the gray-headed ones and the Oregonians. Day after day, they all kept creating chaos around a feeder, offering ample opportunities to sharpen my observational skills. As I also slowly learned some of the vocabulary to describe a bird’s body parts, I began to see that the gray heads have dark lores (and gray heads) and that the juncos from Oregon have a dark hood – easy. Just needed to remind myself of Mt. Hood. It then became fun to tell which junco was which. I like to think my accuracy slowly improved with many repetitions.
Once the trees leafed out, it became ever so much harder to spot birds. Given their relative invisibility, I realized it would be useful to identify birds by the sounds they make. A daunting prospect, to say the least. Clearly, the first step was to become more aware of ambient sounds. A small step, but pretty essential. Without it, forget it, there’s no way to differentiate between different sounds. With greater awareness came opportunities to make distinctions. Telling a Cessna apart from a murder of cawing crows felt like a promising start, leaving plenty of room for further fine-tuning.
Not long after, I learned something else: How learning can enable further learning. One morning, having breakfast outside, I heard what sounded like a red-tailed hawk. I looked up. Nothing to be seen. A minute later, same sound, again. But no hawk in sight. And yet, once more, the sound of a hawk. Then I noticed a blue jay, largely hidden by leaves in a nearby tree. When I heard the hawk sound again, it became clear that it was the blue jay that was actually producing it. A couple times more. No kidding. How curious. It sent me to read up on and listen to blue jays on the web. And, turns out, it’s just one of the things they do – mimic a hawk (actually a red-shouldered, rather than a red-tailed hawk, but that’s seemed like a detail).
Realizing that repetition need not be limiting, but can instead be enriching, I’ve learned the value of (sometimes) purposely seeking out repetition, rather than letting it happen accidentally, or aspiring to develop a “life list” and striving to observe ever more species. Each experience holds potential for learning something, and we should not turn a deaf ear (or a blind eye) to the positive increments of gradual accumulation. So, when a bird now tells me “tweet – repeat, repeat, repeat,” I try to pay attention.
