Birders: Am I an idiot?

We get so many beautiful birds in our yard, and I can't identify them by song. We get goldfinches & house finches, and sometimes purple finches. Cardinals, indigo buntings (rare), Carolina wrens, boat-tailed grackles, purple grackles, mourning doves. Red-belly woodpeckers & downy woodpeckers -- and I think I've seen a northern flicker a time or two. Juncos, nuthatches, titmice . . . SO many beautiful birds, and so many fantastic calls! But I can't identify them!

I know when it's a woodpecker but I don't know which kind is calling -- the downy or the red-belly. I know the Carolina wren's song but I can't recall it -- and when I hear it, I can't say "that's a Carolina wren."

We have eleventy-seven bird books, but I don't read bird. The way the books try to describe what the bird's call sounds like makes no sense to me. Besides "oh, sweet Canada, Canada, Canada" (white-throated sparrow?) I can't translate their words into what the songs are supposed to sound like.

And I've been to sites like e-Nature, which are great: they show you a picture of the bird and play its song for you. Great. For the birds I can identify by sight. But I can't find the songs of the ones I know we have! IOW, there are birds out there I've never seen, and if I knew them by their songs, I could probably add at least 10 birds to my list.

Am I a total idiot? Is there some way to learn this without banging my head on the wall (and without resorting to instructional bird call CDs)?

birdsong library to no avail. If you're up to it, take an early morning walk with a birder group, or better, an bird dude/dudette who knows their stuff and can i.d. the songs for you.

Contact your Local Audubon Society Chapter and they can put you in touch with local birders that can pin down the i.d.

that I actually talk to people. :scared:

;) Kidding. I'm an introvert, but not that bad. You've both made a great suggestion. Thanks.

I've been birding for more than 20 years and I still don't get the songs as described in the books. Try tapes. Also, get a good bird book. I recommend Peterson's and the new Sibley's. Get fairly decent binocs and you are good to go. Get the close view, check the book, "call it" and that is all there is to it!

Good Birding!

Just get the right one for your region. Same with the Peterson book, they are broken up into regions. Sibley's covers all of North American, I think.

It's really tough. The birding cds aren't as scary as you're thinking, though. Peterson's Birding By Ear will help you with a lot of these (especially those damnable woodpeckers) and is wildly funny because they picked the nerdiest man on Earth to do the narration.

Carolina wren is supposed to say "teakettle-teakettle" but I always thought it sounded more like "cheeseburger." Probably just me being hungry, though.

It's a set of 3 tapes with a booklet. I bought one for the Eastern region, but I haven't had the time to use it yet so I can't vouch for its helpfulness.

I agree with you, the word-descriptions of most bird calls are useless unless you already know the song. It's like saying a zipper makes a sound like "zzzip". Sure, once you know the sound, the description fits and reminds you of the sound, but not the other way around.

For most North American birds, especially on the level of feeder birds of the east, it's a perfectly good way to learn songs by watching a calling bird. If you live in a sufficiently wooded area, you're probably hearing additional songbirds that just hang too high in the trees, or too deep in the brush, to be seen easily. But for most of them (and realize "most" is slanted by my location in a brushy environment where nothing calls from much higher than 20 feet up), the best way is to spend time listening to a bird's call as you try to find it, choosing for yourself the description of the call, and then visually identifying the bird.

For what it's worth, the old Golden Guide had these funky graphs of acoustical readings along with range maps etc. I found the sonograms (which look like an earthquake tracing, but is essentally like a sheet of music with much compression) quite useful in sorting out bird songs.

A used cassette tape version of Stokes' guide to eastern bird songs is available on Amazon for $4, so you can get these things for pretty cheap.

I've never had any luck with picking other people's heads for advice with the calls. Living in South Texas, we get occasional tropical strays, which people with extensive tropical birding experience pick out by sound (which is much more important in finding tropical birds than it is with most temperate birds). I've not gotten much from their descriptions. So don't worry about giving in to extroversion for this purpose alone.

As to Carolina Wren, it has a complex range of calls. Don't feel bad about not being able to easily pick them out: besides something like 18 individual calls, there's also the matter of calls that sound similar to many different songbirds. And yes, the descriptions of wren calls is no better than other written descriptions (probably Canada-Canada-Canada or some meaningless phrase). The only wren whose call ever seemed easy to me is Canyon Wren.

Short answer: get the tapes or CDs. I use Stokes east/west guides, but there are some others out there. That's how I finally learned the songs.

naturesongs.com has a nice collection of western songs (specifically Arizona), as well as from Costa Rica, and a bunch of non-bird and non-birdsong stuff. Their links page gives a number of good sites, including some that focus on eastern songs.

This might help:

http://www.math.sunysb.edu/%7Etony/birds/links.html

d

Takes a long time, but is the only thing that works for me.

When I hear a new song that I do not recognize, I grab my nocs, my bird book and stalk the little darlin until I can isolate which feathered friend is singing the song. Identify the bird with the nocs and bird book, voila, you have it.

legwork and devotion.

my rufous sided towhees came to call a couple of weeks ago to tell me goodby until next winter. Goldfinch are leaving, but blue birds and scizzor tails are here.

I havent seen any meadowlarks in two years. Any other Texans out there missing meadowlarks in the winter?

I appreciate the help. I no longer feel like an idiot. Just a moran. ;)

I think I might be tone deaf or something as I was given 7 years of piano instruction as a child and never learned to play with any discernible level of skill. The Golden Guides give the sonograms but they are useless to anyone who can't read and hear music. I have tried eNature but some of their tapes are pretty iffy. I say break out the cash and invest in some CDs. Don't worry about learning all of the birdsongs if you are tone deaf or have trouble remembering sounds.

Also, learn categories and don't kick yourself even if you can't ID the species because just being able to ID a category helps. I have trouble telling Red Bellied Woodpecker from Red-Headed Woodpecker and Pileated from Flicker and Downy from Hairy but at least now I can set my eye and know if I am looking for a large bird (Pileated), medium (Red-head) or smaller (Downy), and you would be surprised how much it helps me find the bird.

If you learn one bird song every month, in 4 years you will know the most common songs for your area and have a vocabulary of almost 50 birdsongs to build on. Despite my tone deafness, I can ID most birds by song that visit my yard regularly. I'm even getting to where I can tell Northern Cardinal versus Tufted Titmouse -- two birds that, to me, have very similar songs.

Even if you only learn the most common songs, it saves time, because you don't spend a lot of time looking for yet another Cardinal/Titmouse or Carolina Wren. You can look for the bird with the unfamiliar song first when scanning the trees.

thanks a bunch, amazona.

(to be able to ID birds by their song)!

Everyone has posted such good ideas. I like the e-nature web site. I think it is just going to take practice and more practice and the time to devote to it.

there are parks run by the MNCPPC in your area that have bird walks on a regular basis.
You can also go in and talk to the naturalists anytime and they are glad to help you.

I think there is one off of rt 4 by the name of cypress creek or cypress swamp,, something cypress at any rate.
then there are some in PG county off of 214, one off of 1997.
Montgomery county has brookside nature center, right next to brookside gardens. a must see.

I love my birds. I just wish they would eat less.

Keep trying! I've been trying for a couple of weeks to identify one in my backyard that I can hear but not see. It's driving me bonkers, so I know where you're coming from!