I know someone who was working on a personal project last year to learn as many local bird songs as possible. She had a list of species and would pick one, listen to its call from a CD multiple times, then go out on walks and try to find one. When she was confident in her ability to identify that one, she’d pick another and start over. It seemed to work quite well for her.
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I’m a visual learner and mnemonics don’t work for me. I have more problems keeping the mnemonics straight than the songs straight. I use the sonogram. I like the book Warblers that compares the details of the sonograms. With that I can the tune my ear to actually hear those differences too! And then a lot of listening with Merlin in hand and not in hand to check my progress. Then I go back and review the sonograms and sound recordings of the birds that I am learning and then I have to tune up my ear again with every break from listening.
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It is amazing that you can “hear” based on seeing a sonogram. That seems even higher level than “hearing” by reading musical notation.
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It definitely helps to have played an instrument, but the concept that the high notes are higher and the lower notes are lower is probably accessible to almost anyone with practice. With Merlin I can select a snippet of sonogram and replay just that and that helps me connect the picture with the sound.
There are many warblers around me whose songs start with almost the same notes and the main differences are the really high notes at the end that can be hard to hear at all. However their sonograms look different and paint different pictures. Just another form of pattern recognition and with regular use it is surprising how fast the ear and eye can start to connect together. My only problem is that I find it really hard to see the birds when I looking at the tiny screen on my phone!
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It helps to have a memory for sounds/tunes. My brain works visually but while I can associate a song with bird I have seen in the field, when I hear the next bird singing the first one is erased from memory. I’ve been birding for over 50 years and it has always been like that. I can’t hold a tune or sing in tune either. Mnemonics don’t help a lot. One problem is that visual recognition uses nameable features (colour, wing bars, size, beak shape etc) but sound is just sound, very little to hang your hat on … for me anyway. I have a friend who can stand in a field at dawn during migration and reel off IDs for 20+ species one after the other while I just hear bird-soup.
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Actually, this link points out features of sounds: http://www.thewarblerguide.com/uploads/9/5/6/8/95684880/memorizingbirdsongs.pdf
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It’s amazing all the different ways brains work! And the different ways to make IDs.
I started out using Merlin, but as I got even more into birding, the bird songs just stared to get in my head. I can now ID lots of bird songs, but I do have troubles with the Warbler calls sometimes. For me, it is now memorization and also listing to bird calls on merlin, to get to memorize them even more.
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I’ve been using Merlin Bird ID app’s audio setting which helps with putting a name to the calls. I have not have much calls memorized much but this app definitely helps a lot if you use it a lot and consistently.
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Contrary to many in this thread, I’ve only gotten Merlin recently, and I hardly rely on the “CV” it has for the songs and calls, probably because I have learnt most the commonest songs and calls for my area “manually”. (I’m sure when travelling abroad, it is a godsend for the frequently heard birdsongs) However, the sonograms are a blessing especially out in the field! I don’t know how I’ve lived without them! I mainly use it to record a species that I have heard, or to manually ID it later when I have an archive of bird noises at my hands. This would have been a similar way I have learnt IDing bird sounds in the past. That and listening to them prior and hearing them in the field after.
But as an autistic person, with a particular sensitivity to sounds, I somewhat feel like it has helped me in picking out sounds from a particularly busy environment and especially with more distant calls (however, it certainly has it’s downsides in everyday life not relating to birding.) Actually, the Irish birder and ornithologist Seán Ronayne, aka. Irish Wildlife Sounds has had a similar experience when he talked about it in his documentary “Birdsong” on RTE.
I more or less agree with everyone else’s replies. However, a little detail I like to focus on that I haven’t heard others do is the voices of the species, and their “speech patterns” as well as the overall song and calls. For example, 3 “true” tits are in Ireland, Great, Blue and Coal, and to me, if you took away their easily IDable songs and calls (which does happen, they have quite variable calls), then their voice usually helps me. Greats have a deeper, melodic, rhythmical, but sometime a somewhat scratchy voice, Blues have a simple, middle-high pitched, energetic voice, Coals have the highest pitch, somewhat melancholic voice, usually having a noticeable descending or ascending quality at the end of their notes. It’s almost like how one can recognise human voices (however, I’m not as experienced in those as in birds lol).
Of course, there are similar birds, like I most frequently mix up coals with goldcrests (although goldcrests have an even higher voice), and greats with chaffinches (especially the “pink pink” calls of chaffs, greats can sometimes mimic it), but this is where recording the noises comes in helpful, as I can easily replay the calls over and over and compare to others recordings. Habitat is also crucial, like coals only really occur in forests, where greats and blues can occur outside of that. This can also possibly eliminate other confusions.
And lastly, I tend to remember better when hearing them out in the field. I can listen to them all I want from others recordings, but I feel if I hear them in field, bring home a recording, and ID them from that, I more or less have that call/song/noise in my memory bank from then on out, although a little more practice wouldn’t hurt. :)
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I so much agree! I also realize when I’m in the field I’m concentrating on learning my local birds in context. If I’m lucky I get to hear them multiple times at different times of day and over multiple days and can get a sense of their local accent. I can analyze my own recordings and then go out the next day and apply what I just learned. I get a bit overwhelmed at peak migration when too many new birds arrive at my doorstep at the same time. I guess mnemonics are useful to enable keeping many more birds straight, but I’m happy to just know the birds nearby.
I use Merlin Bird audio ID out in the field and I just started to go through the audio clips on observations that are research grade to learn new calls
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I only know a few calls from memory, but it’s some of the more common ones in my area. I learned to mimic the northern cardinal’s mating call for photography, and I just have enough robins in the spring to tell them apart from the others. The easiest ones are the birds with distinct calls, like the jays, crows, eagles, and hawks. The hawk screech is what people think an eagle sounds like. Turkeys don’t just gobble, they also bark, and after working at the zoo, I found that they make a lot of sounds similar to orangutans apparently XD
It also helps to go through the research grade observations that have sound in your area. every now and then I fave an observation which has the song of a bird I know I have trouble identifying from sound, particularly if it’s fairly isolated and good quality. that way I can double check my guesses.
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If you are in North America, there is an old set of CDs (previously cassettes, that’s how old it is) called Birding by Ear and More Birding by Ear. They are old enough that some of the bird names have changed, but they do a great job of presenting you with the sounds of several similar birds and teaching you how to tell the difference. I highly recommend them for beginning to learn how to hear and learn bird sounds. Just listening to recordings of birds is not always very helpful if you don’t know what to listen for!
These are available on Amazon, but check your local library system first because they are old enough to be part of many library collections. (You might have to order it from another library in your system.)
I also learned a lot from Donald Kroodsma’s The Singing Life of Birds, which comes with audio. He has a newer one called Birdsong for the Curious Naturalist that may be better at teaching you how to start out, but just reading his accounts of listening to robins (for example) helped me to learn what characteristics to listen for. There are also spectrograms, which I also find really helpful.
Speaking of spectrograms, I think they are Merlin’s best feature. You can see them coming across your screen, very nearly in real time, and you can learn to match what you hear with what you see! The visual component can help you to distinguish sounds and to hear more details. I frequently watch the spectrograms even if I already know what bird(s) I am hearing. There are also spectrograms with Merlin’s audio recordings, and with everything submitted to eBird.
And if you really like spectrograms, there is a spectrogram field guide! The Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds (eastern or western North America) has an index where you can even look up bird sounds in reverse. It takes some practice to be able to use it, but it’s a great resource. One of the things it can do is help you to develop a vocabulary to describe the sounds you hear!
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What do you recommend in technology or apps for creating sonograms?
I am not the person you asked, but Merlin does show you sonograms/spectrograms (the terms are interchangeable in this context).
On a computer, Audacity can show spectrograms. You may need to adjust the settings a bit to make them more helpful for bird sounds, but it’s free and very easy to do. Cornell also has a program called Raven, which has a free “lite” version, which only does bird sounds, so the quality is better, but it’s less multi-purpose.
Finally, if you upload your audio to eBird, it’ll automatically generate a spectrogram. This is not a great way to just get spectrograms of your audio, but if you are already going to be uploading it to eBird, it can be handy.
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I usually focus on getting photos but if the bird is singing and not moving around a lot I’ll get my photos, then open inat on my phone and record the song. It’s fun to get a photo and recording of the same bird and it helps me learn the song. If an unknown bird can’t be photo’d (not visible) I’ll still try to record the song as an iNat record then play it back from my computer with my Merlin app open on my phone to get an ID. Or if it sings long enough I use Merlin in the field after getting my recording. We all have a lot of tools for learning bird songs, certainly more than the days when I’d try to learn them from a LP record!
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Thanks
I find Merlin frustrating as it only knows 11% of bird calls in my area in Northern Australia on a good day. Recently we went on holiday to Tonga and it knew nothing.
So if nothing else, that experience highlighted the importance of recording birds.
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