How to Identify Birds by Ear

Video Transcript

Hello, welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, we're going to be talking about birding by ear. The sounds that birds produce are things that many of us enjoy and sort of learned to love. But in order to remember and utilize bird songs as an aid to feel the identification, there are really three components that are important. First of all you have to be able to hear the birds, which means that you have to have decent hearing. Some people have problems at one end or the other, in terms of song pitch and at one end or another they don't register very high or low pitch sound. So obviously if you have a hearing problem, that's going to limit to a certain extent your ability to use bird song as a way of identifying birds. Other people have great hearing but they may have difficulty discriminating between similar sounds, so that auditory discrimination is something that can be problematical. But fortunately it can be worked upon and overcome with practice and finally there's auditory memory and this is the ability to hold a sound over long periods of time. So that if you encounter the same bird song at distance intervals, you'll recognize it for what it is. So to recap, having decent hearing that allows you to hear the sounds in the first place. Secondly the ability to discriminate between similar sounds and third the ability to remember sounds over time are all three things that collectively work to make birding by ear something that be a very enjoyable past time but may require some practice.

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