Sounds of Spring Birding by Ear

by Karen L Monsen

Spring arrives with the honking of migrating geese, the rallying call of a Gambel’s quail, and the chatter of hatchlings competing for parental attention. Although birders rely mainly on sight for identification, by honing listening skills, you can expand your birding proficiency and add a new dimension and appreciation to spring bird walks.

Why Birds Vocalize

“Birds are compulsive singers,” states avid birder Paul Hicks. “They can hardly help themselves, especially in the spring and early summer when they are establishing and/ or protecting their territory for the nesting season.” Hicks, who moved to southern Utah from Washington state when he retired, will present a “Birding by Ear” workshop and field practice session during the Red Cliffs Bird Fest, April 27–29, 2023 (registration at http://www.redcliffsbirdfest.com).

Hicks explains that males sing to maintain their food supply and warn competitors, often from an elevated perch. “This is MY territory! Don’t mess with me!” The morning cacophony, called a pre-dawn chorus, is also designed to attract female birds in the morning when they are the most fertile.

According to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology (https://academy.allaboutbirds.org), female birds also sing, but “chances are when you hear a bird singing, it’s a male. The majority of female songbirds in temperate zones use shorter, simpler calls while the males produce the longer and more complex vocalizations we think of as a song. In the tropics, females commonly sing, and many engage in duets.”

How Birds Vocalize

Songbirds make up about half of the 10,000 global bird species. Sound is produced by the vibration of air molecules moving outward in bands of air pressure called sound waves. Our ears detect the waves as sound, and we can visualize them on spectrograms showing high or low pitches and loudness in zigzag lines.

Although birds possess a larynx, unlike humans, they usually do not use it for vocalization. Songbirds use a syrinx—a song-box organ located where the trachea splits into two bronchial tubes. The length of the trachea and bronchial tubes determines the sound quality and frequency. Each side of the syrinx operates independently, allowing birds to produce two pitches at once.

According to Cornell’s research, in a tenth of a second, the northern cardinal can produce more notes than a piano has keys, and the wood thrush can simultaneously create rising and falling notes. Topping that off, birds learn songs and have local dialects. Bewick’s wrens, per Hicks, “may possess a repertoire of more than 20 distinct songs; further, their songs differ in significant ways from one region to another.” The northern cardinal can sing 8–10 songs, American Robins 70, and northern mockingbirds around 200.

Mockingbirds are in a group called mimids, who are expert impersonators. The brown thrasher, according to Cornell Lab, has a repertoire of around 2,000 song types, and along with mockingbirds, they can mimic and weave in the voices of other birds as well as sounds like car alarms and cell phone rings. Here is a fun fact from Laura Erickson’s The Birdwatching Answer Book: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a pet starling that could mimic tunes and make variations on them, leaving us to speculate if any variations made it into his compositions.

Learning to Listen

With his personal record of audibly identifying 42 species in one spot, Hicks asserts, “You will hear the largest number of birds where multiple habitats converge.” In our semi-arid region, riparian corridors, wetlands, streams, and springs are all bird magnets. When temperatures rise, head for the cooler highlands.

Different methods can help you identify calls and songs. Practice is the most important! Some songs and calls are distinctive, like those of the whip-poor-will, goose, mourning dove, Gambel’s quail, raven, or crow; others are more difficult to decipher. Hicks uses an acronym— PPPLIQ— to identify techniques by listening to pitch (high or low, rising or falling), pace (fast, slow, varied), pattern (rhythm or configuration of notes and phrases), length (long, short, or medium), intensity (loud, soft, variable), and quality (tone, timbre, including feeling).

Some people find visual graphs representing the sound waves helpful—with lines, dots, and dashes showing pitch and rhythm changes. Others prefer mnemonics, like “sweet-sweet summer-sweet” for remembering the yellow warbler, “deeear me, kitty-did scare me” for the whitecrowned sparrow, or “chicka-dee-dee-dee” for the blackcapped chickadee. Whether you notice the machine-gun staccato of a Wilson’s warbler or the weaker trill of an orange-crowned warbler, you can select the association method that works best for you.

Overall, Hicks’ advice is to start small, and practice, practice, practice! He recommends choosing five or six species to master and then expanding to more. “Describe a song to yourself in a way that makes sense to you and helps you remember it.” Technology, CDs, and online games are available to assist learning.

Apps and Learning Tools

From Cornell’s exhaustive online audio library to games and apps, learning tools can improve your bird identification proficiency. The Merlin Bird ID (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/) is a free downloadable app. Peterson and Stokes both have CD bird calls and song collections. Larkwire (http://www.larkwire.com) and Cornell’s Bird Academy: Bird Song Hero (https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/ bird-song-hero/) offer online learning games.

As the spring sunrise chatter builds to a pre-dawn chorus, answer the citizens band (CB radio) question, “Yew gotcher ears on?” Most importantly, Hicks reminds us, “ENJOY! Learn the sounds because you want to better appreciate and explore and enjoy the wonder of God’s incredible creation!”V

Save the date! Red Cliffs Bird Fest is April 27–29, 2023.