Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada
IDENTIFYING BY EAR NOT ALWAYS EASY, BUT GETTING BETTER May/June, 2011 issue After almost 40 years of listening to the recorded songs of over 300 species of birds known to occur in this area, I am pleased that I can now identify by ear almost everything I hear singing in the field. I even offer workshops at Prince Edward County’s popular Birding Festival on identifying by ear. However, while I can offer a few tips on how to recognize certain sounds, it isn’t something one can learn in a two-hour workshop; it needs to be committed to memory, and that takes time – a lot of it! Identifying by ear is an ongoing exercise. Surprises are thrown at listeners of bird song from every direction. Northern parulas that arrive here from their wintering grounds in Mexico in May have an interesting song, in fact, two. Described by Peterson in his field guide as a “buzzy trill that climbs the scale and trips over at the top,” we can compare it to the sound of a zipper being zipped up. Another song is a series of buzzy notes, terminating in a sort of trill. But why do large numbers of these parulas upon arrival, favour one song over another, suddenly swinging over to another delivery at a given time as though governed by a single impulse? Is it temperature related? Does it have something to do with one song used as an expression of joy while another is reserved for territorial claims? We may never know – and really – is it necessary that we do? One of the joys of birding is the speculation and investigation into why birds do what they do. Sometimes, as film makers John and Janet Foster say, the best ending to any wildlife story is a mystery. Adding to the problems in identifying by ear are dialects. That’s right. Birds have local dialects. Some are detectable, but despite the subtle differences, still reasonably identifiable. Some dialects are so subtle that only electronic analysis can detect the differences. All geographic populations of birds have different dialects, much the same as we do, depending on where we live. Yellow warblers in Kaladar probably sound different from those in Algonquin, who sound different from those at Point Pelee, and they all sound different from the resident yellow warblers in Florida who do not migrate. We may not be able to detect these differences, but electronic analysis can. It has even been shown that migratory birds arriving here on territory, will sing in what can only be loosely termed a “southern accent”, having picked it up from their counterparts while wintering in the south. They lose it quickly, of course, once they are on territory. Amazing stuff, when sophisticated electronic equipment comes into play. So, it’s not a case of learning one song, and applying it to a given species of warbler. In most cases, we must learn several songs, and be ready when they throw a new one at us. Black-throated Green warblers are notorious for this, I find. Even the yellow warbler can sound like a Nashville warbler once in awhile, or a chestnut-sided warbler. Sometimes you have to raise your binoculars, just to make sure. Others like the spirited staccato of the Tennessee warbler is unmistakable as is the yellowthroat, cerulean, and ovenbird, as well as the notoriously late mourning warbler. Some songs we don’t hear, at least, some of us can’t. Blackpoll warblers are among our latest arrivals in the warbler family. It undertakes the longest migration route of any songbird, a few even travelling from Brazil to Alaska, some 8,000 kilometres. Some of this distance is over a 3,000 kilometre stretch of the Atlantic Ocean - over 80 hours of continuous flying. While most warblers have rather pleasing, little whistled songs, chirps and a variety of other pleasant notes, the blackpoll warbler has a song that is missed by many people who are unable to detect the extremely high frequency notes. One birder friend who prides himself in being able to identify most birds by ear, claims he can see the bird singing through his binoculars, but he is unable to hear a thing. His ears just can’t pick up those thin notes that make this bird unbearable to people like myself who experience no trouble hearing it. In fact, only three or four songs from this bird, and I will have developed an unbearable headache. Liken it, if you will, to someone dragging their fingernails down a school blackboard. It is a frequency that I am unable to tolerate beyond 30 seconds. There are others out there, too, with similarly thin, but less irritating high frequency songs. Only last year, I managed to successfully differentiate between the see-saw notes of the black-and-white warbler and the very similarly delivered song of the bay-breasted warbler. Perhaps it was because someone had already told me that a bay-breasted warbler was around, and I purposely strained to hear it, but there seemed to be a definite difference between it and a black-and-white warbler that was singing nearby. The Cape May warbler, too, has a similar song, and adds to the challenge of identifying these “butterflies of the bird world” by their songs. It has taken me 40 years to get this far. The American redstart, also a warbler, is perhaps one of the most difficult to identify by song alone. Its repertoire of songs is amazing, and each one is delivered differently, but after a few decades of being in the field, it all starts to register somehow. Today, it takes a very talented redstart to fool me. All of these tiny members of the warbler family, having journeyed thousands of kilometres from their southern wintering grounds, begin arriving in our area as early as late April, peaking in mid-May, and petering out by early June as they work their way to the boreal forests to breed. Technology in learning these songs is improving. We have come a long way since the days of Roger Tory Peterson’s long play recordings of birds when we would have to start up the phonograph and gently drop the needle onto the record. Now we have CDs, MP3 files and the popular Thayer’s interactive computer program. One birder always carries his hand held IPod with him, the device no thicker than a piece of thin cardboard, containing the songs of every North American bird species, and their photos. I have just received my latest toy – a preloaded 8 GB IPod with a tiny portable IPod speaker that I can carry in the field with me on guided hikes. On it, multiple songs and photos of all the birds of North America, range maps, and a built in quiz to keep me on my toes. And, if I should get tired of listening to birds songs, it also has enough memory to hold almost 2,000 human songs! Your expertise will improve with each passing year. How hard can it be? After all, there are probably no more than 130 variations of songs from the 36 species of warblers that pass through each spring. For more information on birding and nature and guided hikes, check out the NatureStuff website at www.naturestuff.net Terry Sprague lives in Prince Edward County and is self-employed as a professional interpretive naturalist.