The Listening to Birds Blog

Song Thrush by Nigel Pye //

June 5, 2008

So what did I learn?

Filed under: Perception — Tags: , , , — Andrew Whitehouse @ 3:53 pm

Previously I’ve written about techniques for learning bird sounds from recordings and how these can be used when preparing for visits to places where the birds are unfamiliar. Well, now I’ve been to America and heard and seen lots of birds there, so how did I get on with using these methods? Not surprisingly, the results were mixed and I wasn’t always able to identify every sound that I heard. However, there were plenty of occasions when I heard new birds and was fairly confidently able to figure out what they were. Below I outline some of the problems and some of the successes.

Successes: The first birding I did in America was in Central Park, New York and I was pleased that I was able to recognise the thrush-like song of American Robin, with its distinctive alternating phrases. The contextual cue of seeing lots of Robins was obviously helpful in getting me to this conclusion too.

Warblers were the biggest task I faced because there are so many different species (I saw 25 in all) and their songs are often rather similar. Two species that I was able to identify before seeing them were Kentucky Warbler and Blue-winged Warbler. Kentucky Warbler has a simple song consisting of a two-note phrase repeated several times. I remembered this with the mnemonic phrase ‘Fry it, fry it, fry it’ (as said by someone working in KFC I guess!), and this certainly helped me to pick up on the pattern, quality and cadence of the song, which is subtly different to some other warblers, such as Ovenbird. Ovenbird sounds more galloping (it’s almost like it’s saying ‘giddy up’) and less ‘liquid’ than Kentucky Warbler.

Blue-winged Warbler has a fairly distinctive two note song that sounds like someone sighing or even snoring. I imagined someone in blue and yellow (the main colours of this species) snoozing away when I heard this recording. It took just a brief snatch of song to get me onto the only Blue-winged Warbler I saw. I didn’t have to summon up the visualisation, I more-or-less instantly knew what it was.

A group of birds where I hoped a knowledge of the songs would prove particularly useful are Empidomax flycatchers. This is a genus where every species looks extremely similar but where the songs and calls differ more noticeably. I saw quite a few, but unfortunately a lot of these remained silent. However, I was able on a couple of occasions to confidently identify Acadian Flycatcher from its bright, two-note upward inflected song. In this case, to identify the song I first of all needed to know I was looking at an Empidomax and I also checked my own recording against others that I had, just to be sure. I was still pretty confident in the field though.

There were quite a few other occasions when I knew songs without necessarily having to see the bird. The pure tones of an Eastern Wood-pewee and the beautiful lilting song of a Wood Thrush were both very distinctive and when I heard dry rattling songs, I knew, at least when I took context into account, that I was hearing Chipping Sparrow, Worm-eating Warbler or Pine Warbler.

Problems: The biggest problem was actually finding the time to learn the songs beforehand. Figuring out the playlists is a big part of the process, and is in itself integral to the learning process as well as being a practicality. As Stephenson mentions in his article, learning the sounds through testing has to be taken in small, easy steps so ideally it would be best to start learning a few months in advance and to do a little bit each day. My work schedule tended to mean I had to do it in more concentrated spells, which worked less well. Many of the problems I encountered can at least partially be explained by a straightforward lack of preparation. But, why couldn’t I identify all of the sounds I heard? Here are a few reasons.

Only learning songs: Almost all of the sounds I tried to learn were songs rather than calls. This was partly for simplicity’s sake. Learning all the various sounds that most species make would be a very hard task and, as it was spring, I thought a lot of what I heard would be singing. To some extent this was true, but, as I expected, there were lots of other sounds too and I struggled with those. Some I could pick up easily like the Robin-like ‘tick’ of a Northern Cardinal or the ‘chickadeedeedee’ of the various Chickadee species. Others were confusingly obscure or very similar to one another.

Differences between recordings and the real thing: This is another problem that was perhaps not surprising. Many songbirds have local ‘dialects’ and other sorts of variations in their songs, which meant that the song I’d learnt from a recording was sometimes significantly different to the songs of the same species I encountered in the field. This was particularly apparent with Eastern Towhee and Song Sparrow. Of course, part of the skill of learning bird sounds is to be able to recognise the style and pattern of a bird so that variations can still be recognised. That level of skill takes time to acquire though.

Developing the skill of visualisation: Stephenson advocates visualisation to remember sounds. I found this quite tricky and visualisation as a memory technique is not an activity that I found came easily to me. I find it more straightforward to remember words, or perhaps more accurately phrases or even stories. Some of my visualisations worked but I don’t think I ever found the visualisation being ‘triggered’ by hearing the sound in the field. Rather, the visualisations and the stories were useful for becoming familiar with the characteristics of the sound but it was hard to instantaneously relate the sound back to the visualisation when I heard the sound ‘for real’. The mnemonic techniques worked well within the narrow context of testing but they were less effective in the much more open circumstances of the field, when I could be hearing all kinds of sound.

Only learning the context of the playlist: This brings me on to the final problem of both learning the context and learning within a context. Recognition of anything is contextual. If I had heard a familiar British bird in America, I would probably have been momentarily confused because I wouldn’t have been expecting to hear it and would probably have assumed it was an American species that made similar sounds. Admittedly, I didn’t have these difficulties with the numerous House Sparrows I encountered but I knew from guide books that I would be hearing them. But as well as needing to learn the context so that we might anticipate what we encounter, we learn within a context and listening to a playlist, even one that is played randomly, is a different context to the field. The playlist is limited and closed and this means that it only presents certain possibilities. The field is open to manifold possibilities, even if some are more possible than others. These different contexts of listening present different challenges and learning a song within the context of the playlist test is usually more straightforward than knowing what it is in the field. For a start the playlist is based around certain characteristics, e.g. descending songs, so the listener doesn’t have to take so much notice of that characteristic when listening because it’s already a given. The fields where we listen to real birds are vastly more complex and open-ended, although this complexity does at least provide for a lot more clues.

As I mentioned earlier, all of these problems can be countered to an extent by learning over a longer period, becoming more skilled at mnemonics, and by developing more refined techniques. The problem of the limited context of the playlist could, for example, be countered by placing birds on a range of playlists (e.g. habitat or area based ones) and also by testing yourself against all of the recordings in your collection, rather than just within a short playlist.

This process raises a number of questions about the stages of learning and what is it to ‘know’ a sound. In most parts of Britain, I think I know the sounds of birds very well. I don’t often encounter sounds that I can’t put a name to and in many cases I can ‘hear’ the sounds of a species in my head on demand. If I think of a Robin singing, I can hear pretty accurately what it sounds like in my ‘mind’s ear’. In America, I didn’t know the sounds as well as that. If I ‘knew’ a sound it was a less confident kind of knowing. In many of the successful examples I describe above, I still felt that I needed to see the bird to be sure I was hearing what I thought I was. I also found that there were some sounds I knew one day but had forgotten by the next. In only a few cases can I replay the song in my head. In most cases, I only know songs in a contingent way: I know them when I hear them. But ultimately, any kind of knowing is somewhat contingent on circumstances and learning through recordings does not mean that the sounds of the birds are ‘known’ but that one knows what to listen for.

May 5, 2008

How to learn bird sounds at home

Filed under: Perception — Tags: , , — Andrew Whitehouse @ 11:50 am

Learning new bird sounds is difficult for most people, and I don’t regard myself as any better than anyone else despite having been birding for most of my life. I was interested, then, to read this article by Tom Stephenson on Surfbirds about techniques he’s developed to learn bird sounds prior to going on foreign trips. I often find that when I go abroad I can learn to identify birds visually quite rapidly, particularly if I’ve leafed through the field guides beforehand. But learning sounds takes much longer. I can normally pick up a few each day but it’s a struggle and I end up spending much of the trip bewildered by an array of unfamiliar new sounds.

Soon I’m going to be spending a short time in North America and there are other trips abroad scheduled for later in the year, so I was keen to try out these techniques to see if they would help me learn at least some of the songs and calls before I go away. North America is a good place to start because I know a lot of the birds visually but don’t know the songs of many species (I’ve mainly been to America in autumn and winter previously). Also, although it’s very good for birds, it doesn’t have huge numbers of species, so the list of sounds to learn is shorter than it would be for the tropics.

The technique has a number of stages. The first is to gather together the recordings you need, which involves working out what species are likely where you are going as well as downloading, and possibly editing, the recordings. Next you need to make up various playlists of 5-10 species where the calls or songs have similar qualities. This is where the learning really starts and I found it quite a challenge to come up with these. What qualities do you select for the playlists? Pitch (high or low, ascending, descending, staying the same)? Repetition (the same phrase over and over, repetition then variation as with a song thrush)? The number of notes in the song (two, three or four note)? The pattern of sound (rambling and continuous, regular pauses)? The quality of the sound (buzzy, rattling, ‘electrical’, shrill)? Of course a lot of sounds have more than one of these qualities, which complicates things a bit, but trying to figure out the playlists is useful because it requires that you listen actively and systematically to the recordings. I’ve used pretty much all of the above qualities in making playlists, but I still think I need to work on it more, especially with the many rather similar high-pitched songs of birds like warblers.

The next stage is to come up with mnemonics that help you to link the sound to the bird. Sometimes this is relatively easy, for example when the name is onomatopoeic, but Stephenson recommends coming up with ways of linking sound and name through visualisation. The visualisation should ideally link name, sound and the appearance of the bird. For example, least flycatcher, a small American songbird, has a song that sounds a bit like it’s saying ‘titchy’, which links rather straightforwardly to its name and its small size. I imagine a small person saying ‘titchy’ when I hear the sound.

The final part of the technique involves repeatedly testing yourself on each playlist by using the random play function of your media player. This is an aspect of the technique that technology has really helped to facilitate. What’s important here is that the random element enables the mnemonic techniques to be tested actively. This active approach to remembering runs through the whole process and I think this is helpful for learning and remembering in general. Passive learning, whilst it sometimes seems popular in our nation’s schools, is rarely the most effective way of developing skills. The technique also highlights the relationship between hearing and seeing, because it’s through visualisation that the sounds are remembered. One of the important aspects of visualisation is that it tends to be much more instantaneous than the way we remember sounds. For example, when I hear the beginning of a song I often have to ‘play it through’ in my mind to try to remember what it is. Visualisation is, hopefully, much quicker.

I’ll update on my progress after I’ve been to America.

February 4, 2008


Filed under: Research — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Andrew Whitehouse @ 5:12 pm

I spent the final weekend of January on a field trip run by the Wildlife Sound Recording Society at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Caerlaverock in Dumfriesshire. I stayed in the hostel at the reserve itself and so was able to get out at all times of the day to make recordings. Recording wasn’t always easy because there were high winds on Friday and Saturday, which made it difficult to get a clean recording. Sunday and Monday morning were better, and I was also aided in my efforts by my growing familiarity with the site and the daily rhythms of the birds. The weekend also helped me to learn more about the recording equipment I was using: a Fostex FR2-LE recorder and a Sennheiser ME66 microphone. In particular, I got used to setting the gain to an approporiate level – high enough to pick up the detail but not so high as to create distortion and increase noise. I also became accustomed to listening through headphones, which is useful for monitoring what’s being recorded.

Caerlaverock is a noisy place in January, with large numbers of wildfowl and waders using the area. By the end of the weekend I’d decided that the best approach was to set the recording equipment up in a small hide and let it run, capturing the various sounds of the marshes. The best time of day to record was just before sunrise until just after, when the birds were waking up but before the human visitors had arrived. I tried this on Sunday, but the wind was a bit strong and the flocks of geese were distant. On Monday I got things right, recording from a different hide that was out of the wind and with the geese coming into land just fifty or so metres away.

One of the contentions of the project is that bird sounds are evocative of time, place and season and through these recordings I’d like to evoke something of that weekend at Caerlaverock. Of course most people reading this won’t have been to the reserve but perhaps the sounds will still draw out some recollections of other places for you.

The first recordings were those I made on the Monday morning. It was still dark at first and few birds could be discerned by sight. This is the recording I added to my previous post and on it you can hear oystercatchers, teal, mallard, curlew and wigeon. I think there’s a common snipe in there too. There are only a small number of barnacle geese at this stage of the morning.


After about twenty minutes, the first flocks of barnacle geese start to arrive in from the east and can be dimly seen against the slowly brightening sky. Here you can hear two flocks arriving in, and more followed a few minutes later.


Eventually there are several thousand geese settled within a short distance. Late risers appear, including a flock of rooks and a few whooper swans bugling away, their calls almost drowned out amongst the geese.


The whooper swans are easier to hear on this recording, which was made at around 11am on the Sunday. They gather on one of the pools every morning where they’re fed grain by the reserve staff.


You can hear them here too, but there’s less of their excitable clamour and you can also pick out the soft, insistent notes of teal and a few mallards. This was recorded on Saturday morning, when the wind was still quite gusty. You may notice occasional buffeting on the recording.


Nearby, lots of smaller birds gather in the trees and hedgerows around the visitor centre, many of them feeding on the grain put out for the wildfowl. You can hear blue tit, robin, blackbird, wren and yellowhammer with the sounds of the swans in the background reminding you that you’re close to water.


As the day draws on, the barnacle geese are more settled and are busy feeding on grass. On this recording you can hear a flock feeding. Some birds are giving loud yapping calls but there’s a steady murmur of quieter ‘conversational calls’ arising from the flock.


And, although it’s still January, the mild weather encourages a few birds to start singing. This chaffinch sounds like it’s just practicing in readiness for the spring (recorded with Remembird).


So what do these sounds evoke and how do they achieve this? For me of course they take me right back to last weekend and being there making the recordings. They also stir up a few memories, usually a bit less precise, of other places where I’ve heard the same calls. I’m also reminded of other occasions when I was up before dawn and heard the birds waking around me. The power of the sounds always seems to be enhanced by the darkness, when the movements of the birds, and their very presence can only be traced by ear.

Of course here we’re listening to recordings and not real birds. What you’re hearing is not quite like being there and listening yourself, not least because the recordings are in mono and not in stereo. But I think that recordings of sound are still more evocative than images (either still or moving). To me at least, a reasonable sound recording comes much closer to the experience of hearing than a photograph does to seeing. On listening to a recording, I can place myself into that situation. With a picture I feel far more detached from what I’m viewing, even if I took the photograph myself.

For the wildlife sound recordist, the aim is often to produce a recording that approximates to a real experience of listening. There’s also a desire to keep out ‘extraneous’ sounds, particularly human or mechanical noises such as traffic or planes. There were no problems with traffic at Caerlaverock but planes were almost continually flying over and you may have heard some on the above recordings. This recording here perhaps has the noisiest plane, although how loudly you can hear it will depend on what you’re using to playback.


Ordinarily I don’t notice the sound of planes but making recordings certainly brings them to one’s attention. I could hear the planes rather loudly through the headphones at the time and on playing back the recordings they can still seem rather intrusive. This reminds me that a recorder and microphone doesn’t hear in quite the same way that we do. When we hear, we can filter out some sounds and focus in on others. This is a skill that we learn and it means that if we’re listening for birds that’s mostly what we hear and not those extraneous noises that the microphone picks up on. Some recorders have built in filters for low frequency sounds such as traffic and the use of sound editing software enables the recording to be filtered afterwards. But sophisticated though these are, they are unable to reproduce the subtleties and intelligence of listening that humans, and presumably other animals, acquire through their lives.

Thanks to the Wildlife Sound Recording Society and Caerlaverock WWT for a wonderful weekend.

The University of Aberdeen