Spotlight: Godwit looks at world of birdsong
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“According to my parents, I was bird crazy while still in a stroller,” said local birder/biologist David Juliano. “I asked Santa for a field guide when I was 6,” (although he didn’t start birding in earnest until college). After growing up in San Francisco, Juliano moved north to attend Humboldt State University, receiving a wildlife degree.
“My so-so vision and sharp hearing left me at odds in classes where the focus was on seeing birds. So, I became an ear birder, learning on my own using the relatively limited resources available.”
Every year since 2003, Juliano has led Godwit Days workshops on “Birding by Ear,” which will be offered on Saturday, April 17, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. via a Zoom webinar. (Sign up to access the entire three-day, free 13-session festival at www. godwitdays.org.)
Keynote lecture
Colorado resident Nathan Pieplow started birding in about fourth grade.
“I grew up knowing the common feeder birds in eastern South Dakota where I lived. My grandparents had a book called ‘The Birdwatcher’s Bible’, which I picked up one day and somehow got hooked.” Pieplow, who teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is best known in the birding world as the author of the “Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds,” published in two volumes, Eastern (2017) and Western (2019). He will give the Saturday keynote lecture (April 17 from 7 to 8 p.m.) on “The Language of Birds” at this year’s virtual Godwit Days festival.
Most birds make several different kinds of vocalizations, depending on the situation. Pieplow’s workshop covers both songs (for courtship and territorial display) and calls (for group/pair communication, alarm, food begging, etc.).
“The world of birdsong is amazing! Every species has its own language, and learning what different sounds mean is like being let into the club. The mental ability of birds to produce and interpret song is astounding; listen to a Pacific (formerly Winter) Wren, then look at it and think about the size of its brain,” Pieplow said.
According to Pieplow, while learning vocalizations is less intuitive than visual study, most people do it without thinking.
“You recognize the voice of an actor in an animated film, for example. It’s a matter of training your hearing. Some people will be better than others,” he said.
Translating bird sound into human language can be helpful, such as the “Chi-ca-go” transcription for California quail song or “Quick Free Beer” for the olive-sided flycatcher song, or “Potato Chip” for the American goldfinch flight call.
“Mnemonics are a great memory device,” Pieplow said. “Not just words, but other descriptors. For example, lesser goldfinch sounds sad because, well, how would you feel about being called lesser?”
“Hearing loss is a big issue, and high frequency is what usually goes first.
When I can’t tell a brown creeper from a goldencrowned kinglet (both have high-pitched, wispy calls) in the treetops, it will be time to pass the class on to younger ears,” said Pieplow.
“The importance of vocal ID, and corresponding availability of resources, has exploded since the ’90s. I’m jealous of beginning birders today, because back in my day, you had to carry a Walkman and milk cost a quarter and…,” joked Pieplow.
One major reason for that increase in resources to identify birds by their sounds is Pieplow.
“In 2003, I faced the frustration of studying sounds for my first trips to Mexico and Costa Rica and became dedicated to finding new and better ways to learn, describe and catalog bird sounds. I’m not one of those superhuman beings who can identify every singing bird. My high-frequency hearing is getting worse every year, and I don’t have a great auditory memory. I wanted more resources: more recordings, better glossaries, deeper discussions. So, I set out to create my own resources,” he said.
Part of the result was, with Andrew Spencer, starting the Earbirding blog about recording, identifying and interpreting bird sounds (earbirding.com/ blog).
The other part was writing the two Peterson bird sound books, described as “the most comprehensive guides ever published to the sounds of North American birds.” The Eastern version clocks in at 608 pages, while the Western edition is 648 pages.
“It took me 16 years to write the two volumes,” said Pieplow. “I put together over 7,500 sound files that can be found at petersonbirdsounds.com. About half came from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and a quarter were mine. From those, I made over 4,000 spectrograms for the books.”
A spectrogram graphs sound frequencies across time. In this smart phone era, Pieplow recommends the free app Song Sleuth (available for Android and iPhone). This app allows one to simultaneously record sounds and make spectrograms of them. (Be sure to change the default coloring to black and white.) Nine lessons
The Earbirding blog offers an interactive version of the “Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds” introduction across nine, twopage lessons that include many spectrogram examples. Lesson 1 lists five basic pitch patterns that describe all bird sounds: monotone, upslur (rising), downslur (falling), overslur (highest in middle) and underslur (lowest in middle).
Lesson 2 starts with two questions: Does the bird ever sing the same note twice? and Are the notes slow enough to count, or too fast (over eight notes per second)? The answers lead to four basic patterns of repetition and speed: phrases (slow, non-repeated notes), series (slow, repeated single notes), warbles (fast, unique notes run together) and trills (fast, similar notes run together).
Lesson 3 asks about changes in speed and pitch of whole songs. Lesson 4 discusses pauses — does the bird stop to “take a breath”? Some birds can sing for at least 30 seconds without any noticeable pause.
Lesson 5 deals with seven basic tonal qualities: whistles, hoots/coos, ticking, burry/buzzy, noisy, nasal, and polyphonic. Examples of whistles are human whistling and flutes. Hoots of large owls and coos of doves are just extremely low-pitched whistles. Ticks, snaps, or knocks are instantaneous bursts of noise, like ticking clocks or a drumming woodpecker. Sounds whose pitch rises and falls very rapidly are akin to a referee’s whistle or an electric buzzer. Noisy sounds (random, multiple frequencies) resemble static. Nasal sounds are composed of stacked whistles interpreted by the human ear as a single sound, like a police siren or the whine of mosquito wings. Polyphonic tone occurs when a bird makes two whistled or nasal sounds at the same time, sounding “whiny” or metallic.
The seven basic tonal qualities can interact and
combine in myriad ways. For instance, nasal + noisy = shrieks and screeches. Nasal + noisy + burry = crow caws or duck quacks.
Lesson 6 dives deeper into whistles and hoots, similar in sound to blowing across the top of a large bottle. As whistles rise in pitch, they first are mellow, then thinner and more penetrating, finally reaching sibilant, like the hiss of air escaping a tire.
Lessons 7 and 8 expand on trills and noisy/nasal sounds. The final lesson (nine) on polyphonic sounds passes along the nugget that birds can produce two separate sounds simultaneously, one from each lung.
An excellent online source of bird sounds is xeno-canto.org (from Greek for “foreign” and Italian for “singing”). The website is dedicated to sharing bird sounds from around the world. Users can listen, download/upload recordings, and help identify “mystery” recordings. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s www.allaboutbirds.org is another good resource.
Why learn to bird by ear?
Pieplow lists four reasons to bird by ear: 1) birds are often heard but not seen, 2) sound provides a key to bird
location; 3) sound can help identify birds; and 4) one will become a well-rounded birder. So, anyone who’d like to learn how an American robin’s song differs from its call or how an American crow sounds different from a common raven, is invited to tune in to Pieplow’s workshop on Saturday, April 17, starting at 10 a.m., then follow up with Pieplow’s keynote that evening at 7 p.m.
Everyone is invited to register for the free, virtual 2021 Godwit Days Spring Migration Bird Festival. The event consists of 13 sessions, spread over three days (April 16 to 18). The schedule is posted at www.godwitdays.org (click on Second Press Release). Sign up to receive a link to access the entire festival via Zoom webinar. Those viewing most sessions live can submit questions, which the speaker will answer as time permits. All sessions will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Although Godwit Days is offered at no fee in 2021, donations to the nonprofit organization are encouraged to help support the return to an in-person event in April 2022, when Godwit Days will celebrate its 25th anniversary.
Sue Leskiw is the volunteer media liaison for Godwit Days.