Learning Bird Songs

One of the best ways to increase your enjoyment of birding activities is to learn to identify birds by the different sounds and songs that they make. This is especially great for someone that may have some sight issues such as a vision impairment or wearing glasses that can make birding a bit more difficult. This is also a great way to increase the number of birds you are able to find simply because you may not always see the birds right away that you can hear because they may be obscured by foliage, height, and other factors that make it difficult to spot birds. Most birds are designed to be able to blend in with their surroundings along with being small and quick moving and many look very similar to other species if not completely identical. Because of this it can be very difficult to identify or even see certain birds and so it can be a really great asset to be able to find and recognize birds by their unique songs.

A birds song is always unique and it indicates a lot of different factors about each bird that are important to it’s survival. Birds sing to tell other birds about what kind of bird they are, their age, their breeding condition, their gender, whether or not they have a mate and so on. It’s song communicates these different factors to other birds and allows them to find what the need from other birds around them as well. These noises and songs also serve as a way to communicate between members of a flock. They can keep a flock together in an area of dense foliage as well as also conveying information about various sources of food or shelter and even predators that are nearby. These little noises can also serve as identification between members of a flock by providing a sort of a “password” between others of the flock and a way of identifying any enemies, competitors, or intruders and also driving them away.

It’s important to remember that learning bird songs takes a lot of patience and perseverance and it will be a fairly long time before you can naturally pick up bird songs and sounds that you hear. The best way to do it is to have a tutor who can help you learn to identify various birds and the unique noises they make. It’s also best that this tutor is willing to be somewhat repetitive with you and tell you over and over what a certain noise is because this kind of repeated exposure is the best way that you can learn the various songs.

It’s also extremely helpful if you can find some instances where you can watch a bird sing because that can be very instructive as well. If you can’t manage to do that then you might want to head down to your local library and get videos or recordings of various birds singing so that you can study them. This is also a great way to make use of any time you spend in your car driving because you can play cd’s of birds singing and get more used to hearing and recognizing various songs.

It’s best to begin by learning the most common birds first because those are the ones you’ll be hearing the most of and once you’ve learned to recognize and identify those you can tune them out and slowly begin to pick up the songs of other birds. Train yourself to listen to individual birds instead of the whole entire flock at the same time. This will make it much easier for you to identify certain ones as opposed to others even if there is other noise or other birds around. You can also use gimmicks and little rhymes or sound-alike’s to help you remember the calls of certain birds and how to mimic them. These will help you keep track of all  the different calls and it can be helpful to carry a little list with the ones you’ve come up with when you go birding.