Birdsong, Why?

There’s so much I want to say, I’ve delayed saying anything at all. Here’s a quick introduction (three hours later turns out it’s rather lengthy) on how I came to this project and why I think we’d all benefit from listening more to birdsong. From here, I plan to continue to roll out regular installments of new species identification and birding practice pointers. There are a host of common backyard birds that make great starter subjects for beginning birders. Once we’ve established a solid foundation with those species, I’ll ease into birds that are either less common or more difficult to identify. Birding is a practice. The more you know, the easier it is to synthesize new information. Identifications will get easier as you build a solid relationship to the most common birds.

Also, of note, I’m trying to stay on track to keep posts aligned to what is showing up in our neighborhoods as spring progresses. April brings an influx of returning spring migrants to southern Wisconsin, where I’m located, so we’ll see…

Background on the Guide’s Impetus

As an idea, this guide has been around for several years. In the spring of 2018, I was headed into my third field season growing produce and tending a small goat herd at Thistle Whistle Farm in Hotchkiss, Colorado. My course changed when I got selected as a juror for a high-profile murder trial. I had been thinking I needed a change for a while, and it turns out jury duty for a murder trial was just the kickstart I needed. Ugh.

First snow, last season at Thistle Whistle. Aspens aglow and sunchokes abloom.

I was living in the tiny, artsy town of Paonia on the Western Slope. Farming was rewarding but not to my bank account and not necessarily to my social life. And I had reached the conclusion that Thoreau might have been right with his line that the land owns the farmer. I was restless. Then after a long selection process, jury duty began in earnest and lasted all through April. As the landscape was coming to life, I was in a courtroom in one of the most conservative counties in Colorado contemplating big mistakes and big consequences; big flaws in our social constructs; generally speaking, big, heavy, heavy stuff. The world felt like a hurty place then. I had sworn under oath I’d not talk about the trial during my time as a juror, and I stuck to that. So, my head spun day and night, and I took a lot of walks. I watched a lot of birds.

I hired onto a job with the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies that spring. It was an ideal field job for me. I got to get out of Paonia— a place for me that had become a physical representation of all that big, heavy, heavy stuff.  With my new job, I got to travel to a new location every workday. I was getting paid to explore Colorado’s wildest places.

I’ve done this type of work before. I worked two seasons in New Mexico on a breeding survey of Mexican Spotted Owls. I worked a field season monitoring greater sage grouse and sage-obligate songbirds in northern Colorado, and southern Wyoming. I worked a season as a songbird survey crew leader in the sage-steppe of central Montana, and I monitored the fall raptor migration just outside of Missoula, Montana, a few years before that. I’ve held many other jobs working in field biology with flightless animals (and plants), and I’ve dipped in and out of farming and ranching where my interest in nature and for environmental stewardship happily meld with my love of food.

I recently discovered something. Hairy woodpeckers have five-inch-long tongues that circle their skulls and one eye. The tongues are bristly and sticky and have musculature that allows them to wiggle enough to catch insects in small crevices. What!?

Where the magic happens these days.

Birds to me speak of the wonders of evolution. Every single living thing is a part of this complex dance that is evolution. Therefore, every living thing speaks to a connection to a place and its history. It’s mind-blowing stuff. When you invest in the practice of birding, you gain the rewards of discovering these deeper connections, of learning the steps to the dance of life.

My wonder, awe and past field experiences did not prepare me to be a truly effective bird surveyor in 2018. Colorado hosts something upward of 200 bird species. My job had me exploring a multitude of landscapes, representing a variety of ecosystems that host a large portion of these many species. I arrived at that jobs’ week-long orientation and training as the least practiced birder in a group of about twelve people. By birder, here I mean bird identifier. It turns out, for how much I love birds, I don’t really fit in the box of what I think of as the classic birder. A friend recently aptly described me as less of a birder and more of a poker-around. I am more interested in behavior and the story an identification can reveal to me. I’m less interested in checking birds off a list, chasing down rare birds, or getting too deep in the weeds with taxonomic classification. I can lose whole days to sitting and watching, but I often forget to bring my field guide along, and I rarely look things up on my phone while I’m in the field. The last thing I want to be doing is poking around my phone when I could be poking around this whole big world.

These traits seem counter to what I’ve experienced of other birders who seem to thrill in the puzzle of making identifications. I think about this a lot because I go birding with people a lot, and I end up wondering each time anew why it feels like I don’t fit in.

Today, my outsider’s insider status is what I think makes this guide work. But not fitting the bird nerd mold made me shy with the other birders at that Bird Conservancy orientation. Where under other circumstances I’d take the role of class clown, instead I found myself being called on by the training supervisor like I was the kid he wasn’t sure was getting it hiding out in the back of the class.

I was the kid hiding out in the back of class not so much because I my skillset ranked as that remidial compared to my peers, but because I felt like if I didn’t bird with the same style of enthusiasm as all the experts around me, my accumulated knowledge must somehow be inferior. Usually, I’m confident and assertive. In the group of big-league birders, even when I knew a bird inside and out, I never said a peep. Get it, a peep!?

This crew knew their stuff. They’d hear one half-peep from a bird and announce its species, subspecies, and morph (a term for coloration).

I’m bad with names. As a birder, that’s difficult. In my own defense, I think a lot of bird names are lame. Who comes up with them? Long past white guys who by default of their positioning held narrow views of how things should be…

Bird names for me often lack much for context cues. Maybe they speak to an identifying characteristic, but that’s kind of dull. I need real context— not just a color and a body part or some long-gone guy’s name.

Context is key. It’s key to learning and remembering, and it’s key to caring. Context offers a feedback loop. Here’s the equation: context plus caring equals connection. If I see a bird, I want to know if that bird has a five-inch-long tongue wrapped around its skull and one eye. Why not both eyes by the way? I want to know what is going on with that bird and why. To get there though, you must start with the basics.

At bird camp as I’ll call it, we studied birds nonstop. We were either out watching and listening, or we were sitting around picnic tables with our guides and apps and scopes and binos at the ready. It was the ultimate bird-nerd extravaganza.

Sorry, no photos from bird camp. Just me recently out nerding.

At bird camp, I found myself really struggling to differentiate between swallows. I remember back in my Montana bird identification crew days a pair of swallows passed overhead, and my two crew members got out their guides and debated for ten minutes which kind of swallows we just saw. I remember being bored and annoyed. Who cares? They are all the kind of bird that flies past all fast and neck crampingly high. They all fly around together in a mixed jumble of species, so who knows who is making what sound, and if they are all doing the same thing anyhow, what does it matter if one is called one thing and the other another?

But at bird camp I was getting paid to know exactly which species was which. It made a difference for the scientists who were going to apply my collected data to help inform consequential land-management decisions. Each bird has different habitat needs. They look the same passing in a flash, but if you get to know them, each species plays a unique role in the ecosystem. Each bird has its own story, and those stories all tie together. Those stories tell the story of a place.

It’s just so hard to care when you just see a flash of a thing, and you don’t have the context to get to a place where the other parts of the story make themselves known to add color and light and dimension to the scene. See how birding applies to other facets of life? How the practice of bird identification equates to a sort of meditation? A sort of life practice? A sort of being that gives us the ultimate gift of empathy? This is a bird identification blog, but don’t be fooled. By practicing birding skills, you are dipping your toes deep into life’s self-help section.

Seeing a flash of a bird and practicing rote memorization of some identifying feature sounds like the opposite of fun to me. When I’m in those situations, I want to run screaming.  I found myself in those situations a bit at bird camp, but I also found that my fellow birders with all their collective years of knowledge and experience shared a wealth of stories as they bubbled with enthusiasm over their identifications. The details and emotions in those stories offered me the context that allowed me to flip a switch in my brain so I could see the benefit of making the full effort to differentiate between species.

Then, someone said the rough-winged swallow sounded like it was farting on all the other swallows. I was all in. Here was a foothold in context. I could stand on that until I built a solid foundation made from personal experience.

This guide is the foothold you can stand on until you have built a foundation of personal experience.

Once, at bird camp, we made a game of describing what the various swallows sounded like, and then I disappeared off to my tent and drew everything out as cartoons so I would remember. I was so tickled by my drawings that I later emerged from my tent able to identify all the swallows in Colorado. And I found myself willing and eager to show my coworkers my drawings. I made a peep and more. And my coworkers said, “You should make a guide. I’d totally read it.”

Some Thoughts on the Bird Guide

This past year, our lives became unmoored. Our usual markers, those markers we always assumed to be indispensable, those markers that keep us on our daily paths proved ultimately—disposable. Disoriented as we were, we went on without our annual celebrations, our daily commutes, our routines, our certainties, our frameworks within which we had built our lives.

The thing with birds is they exist in large part outside of human constructs. They go on with their seasons, their migrations, their next generations, their songs, whether people are watching or not. Birds offer a framework that isn’t going away. My life this past year looked totally different from the one I expected. Still, knowing the nature of things, I am comforted in knowing the days still have structure. Birds remind me I am part of a bigger whole.

A Last Anecdote

Friends and family often send me texts describing a bird they want me to help identify. They know I delight in their enthusiasm, but behind that delight, I often wish they’d provide a few more authenticating details. From these texts, I gather that new or novice birders depend primarily on color and size to identify birds.

A recent text, “Bird? Black and white, long legs, on the ground by gravel and dirt. Lots of singing.”

I responded, “Mockingbird.”

Yay me for that quick ID. If I didn’t fear it would dampen the flame of birding enthusiasm, my ideal response to that text would go, “Thank you after all these years of texting me descriptions solely based on color for finally including a line about habitat and behavior. In our human experience we are given the gift of being a piece of the universe—a piece that is capable of being conscious of itself. Isn’t that marvelous? We hold the great gift of awareness, and yet, we are minute specks in the grand scheme of creation. In our blood swims the history of our ancestors. If we track the trail of our DNA back far enough, we reach the inevitable conclusion that we all sprouted from the same humble beginnings as single-celled swamp muck on a planet that would be utterly unrecognizable to us today. If we go back further, we will come to see that we are literally made of space debris. We barely have the capacity to comprehend the workings of our daily lives, let alone our neighbor’s lives, let alone the infinite gestures of time and space. So, thank you for including that note on the bird’s habitat and behavior. How often we get lost in our myopic vision of things. If we open ourselves up to ask not only what but why—we open ourselves to see the connections between things. We open our narrow pinprick view of the great mystery that is existence, and how rewarding this new vantage!”

My thumbs have never gotten the hang of texting. If I tried to send that text, I’d be lost on a futon somewhere, dehydrated, emaciated, with a very low battery on a phone that just got flung across the room.

A Case for Birding by Sound Because Every Good Blog Contains Lots of Lists

1.       Birds are often hard to see but easy to hear. Let’s pick the low fruit!

2.       Even when you get a good view of a bird, you are left to pick through often subtle visual cues to differentiate species. Audio cues are usually more straight-forward and thus easier to differentiate. More low-hanging fruit!

3.       Listening is a practice. The practice will bleed into other facets of your life, leaving you more grounded and better situated to deal with yourself and others.

4.       The sounds birds make add a rich layer of story that can inform on their behavior, the habitat you find them in, what is happening in your neck of the woods and when. The more you know about birdsong and calls, the more you will know about wherever you are. You will start to build connections that lead to greater curiosity for the natural world.

4.5. When you get to know your local birds, you are getting to know the seasons, the weather, the minutia, and the grand scheme. Becoming familiar with birds leads to a richness in experience that extends well beyond birds.

5.       When you correctly identify a bird, you will greatly impress friends, family, and lovers.

6.       Well-practiced birding is a form of meditation. What activities bring on human’s most desired states? Sex, drugs, rock & roll, and bird nerding. We seek out these conditions that at their base are the same. They cause us to lose ourselves. In the process we connect to something greater. When we hit just the right note, we shed our baggage and move through the world on a plane that feels like, well, something a step closer to divinity. We connect with the present in a way that opens us up to that great big idea that we are part of something so much more than our biggest woes, or greatest triumphs, our deepest shames, our darkest hours, our mightiest joys.

7, 8, 9, 10.       Hairy woodpeckers have five-inch-long tongues that wrap around their skulls and their right eye.

American Robin

Robins are the literal early bird that gets the worm. As the dawn chorus’s opening act, robins start to sing well before sunrise.

Like a good yard sale, the robin speaks to the suburban experience. On a summer day look out at any lawn, and you’re likely to see a robin. Watch telephone wires, treetops, clotheslines, anyplace with a foothold and a prominent view, and you’ll eventually catch sight of a robin. Because they are ubiquitous, robins are a good “early bird” for practicing identification as a beginning birder.

Robin songs are easily identified through temporal cues. They are among the first birds to sing each morning. Robin song dominates the earliest half-hour or so of the dawn chorus. When I worked as a songbird survey technician, it was my job to wake up before sunrise to get out when birds are most vocally active in the wee morning hours. I associate robin song with those moments in bed just after my alarm has sounded but before I’ve gotten the gumption to rise and make my way out to the field. It’s still pitch-black outside, but the robins are already at it, singing their lilting melodies. For me, their song conjures that feeling of resistance the body makes when its begging to press snooze but forced into action. The robins were their own sort of alarm clock, telling me I’d reached beyond the realm of snooze.

Above: The robin’s song consists of a flowing melody that sounds as if it’s pulling loopy-di-loops on itself. Many species sound similar to robins, but theirs is the only call to fray into nearly inaudible high notes.

Above: Cheaps appear as isolated spikes

Robins must love good deals, the way they’re always yelling, “Cheap, cheap, cheap.” Maybe they are excited about yardsale deals, but more likely they are feeling territorial. Robins often nest near human activity, and in doing so, they put themselves and their nests in our paths. When we cross those paths, robins often scold us with relentless, close-range cheaps. Since it’s so common, novice birders will do well to pay attention and learn to describe the call. Some useful descriptors might include: loud, sharp, and insistent. Think about how the call rates next to other things you hear around the yard, on your walk to work, in the parking lot, wherever. If you learn the topography of the robin’s call, you can later employ it as a baseline of comparison for other species.

I also associate robins with rain, with that feeling of stepping with bare feet onto a steaming sidewalk after a passing summer shower. Robins break into song after rain as if they are celebrating the return of the sun. It’s a jovial song with lots of ups and downs, most often sung in a chorus (individual robins chiming in across the land), so that the song of the robin adds its own color to the ornate tapestry of this Midwestern landscape.

Recently fledged robins appear a bit clownish with their speckled bellies and overlarge beaks. Through peak yard sale season, watch them hop their ways towards the day when they grow their big-kid feathers and fly away..

Robins also make a high pitched, sometimes barely audible alarm call that goes something like, “sssssp.” Alarm calls across species are often high-pitched, consisting of frequencies that are hard for predators (like people) to track. If you think you hear a robin’s alarm call, take a second to stand still and scan the ground and low branches for birds. It’s good practice for your ears to follow sounds to their source, and it’s good practice to take a cue to pause and re-attune yourself to your surroundings. If the day is going along as usual and everyone seems to be calmly going about their business before you hear a sudden flurry of “ssssssps,” take the chance to look for the source of the robin’s alarm. Tuning into alarm calls is a great way to catch rare glimpses of more elusive wildlife.

That’s what’s great about robins. They are so common, they offer us a thread that’s always within reach and sturdy enough to keep us connected to the natural world. Wherever we are, however busy or distracted, there’s a robin doing its robin thing, singing its robin song, reminding us that there’s a whole world out there ready and waiting for us to take notice.