Month: October 2017

Resources for Learning to Identify Bird Song

Posted on by Jess

Like anything else, learning bird songs takes practice and close attention. Here are some resources and my experiences that may help guide you.

How I Learned

  • Mnemonic/Sound Pattern Recognition: When I took ornithology in undergrad, we used Peterson’s Birding by Ear which groups songs by characteristics and thereby teaches you to listen for broad characteristics, patterns and mnemonics. Thus, I’m a little biased and potentially a little “old-school.” Yet, I’d highly recommend this resource to start learning “how to listen” to bird songs.
  • Repetition of Bird Songs: Audio sources that include a compendium of bird songs with the bird species names, such as Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs, let you replay the song until you can commit it to memory. Other collections of songs that don’t start with the bird species name can be used for quizzing yourself.
  • Quiz: The aforementioned Peterson’s Birding by Ear audio CD has tests at the end, and since then Larkwire has been released, which quizzes the listener with songs from groups of 4 species at a time. There is still demand for different quiz formats, though, that are feasible to implement with a little programming elbow grease!

A Newer Technique (in the sense of availability): Spectrogram analysis

We didn’t learn this when I took undergrad ornithology, but it’s my understanding that this is now more commonly taught. There are also now many more tools on the scene that make spectrograms of bird songs accessible.

  • Handbook of Bird Biology:  This was the newer textbook on the scene, again introduced after I took the class. Chapter 10 is titled “Avian Vocal Behavior” which is largely illustrated through spectrograms, and has links to online material.
    • Bird Academy: The online material for the textbook is freely available, and under the umbrella of this site.
  • Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America
  • Analysis Software
    • Raven Lite 2.0
    • Spectrogram Phone Apps: While it appears some of the automated bird song identification apps have some catching up to do, you could still potentially record the spectrogram of a call/song and compare it with the above book.

My Twitter Game: #NameThatBirdSong

Posted on by Jess

I’ve started a game on Twitter, running weekly with the hash tag: #namethatbirdsong

Every Weds 12pm I’ll post a bird song, and you tweet your own original (or post for a friend with attribution) mnemonic device, that differs from the widely accepted mnemonics taught for the posted bird song (#altmnemonic) along with the game hash tag (#namethatbirdsong)! I’d love it if you use both tags, but you only need to use the game hash tag, to be sure I see it. So, for example, if I posted red-eyed vireo as the challenge bird for the week, I’m stealing this example answer from my friend Kate for what a tweet entry should look like:

“It sounds like it’s talking to itself. ‘Do I turn left here?’ ‘Yea it’s a left’… #namethatbirdsong”

You can answer until 11:59pm central time Weds, and if you don’t have an entry, you can vote on the day’s entries with “likes” for the tweets. I’ll compile the top 4 entries into a poll posted no later than 10:30am Thurs morning, and voting will be open until 3:30pm. The winner will be announced no later than 4pm Thurs.

Ecomusicology & Bird Song Mnemonics

Posted on by Jess

Thanks to a conversation with my friend, Dr. Kaitlin Stack Whitney, over Twitter, I learned that there’s an entire field of study that is poised to look formally into some of the concepts that have been nebulously floating about in my mind about how we process bird songs. Most recently, I’ve been interested in mnemonics, which are commonly used to describe and help people remember bird songs. There are common ones (some so common and relatively recent they comprise the modern English common names of some of our bird species) and ones that people make up in the field as they go. I always loved when my friends who were learning bird song would make up mnemonics as we were hiking, and I still wish I’d written them down somewhere back when! I experienced the same thing when I taught forestry summer camp, and students would come up with mnemonics when they first paid attention to a particular species song.

Mnemonics are commonly used because they generally work so well for us. My favorite resource to aurally learn bird song, Peterson Birding by Ear, relies heavily on mnemonic devices. There are mnemonics that are almost universally taught (e.g. “oh sweet Canada, Canada, Canada” for white-throated sparrow, though even as I type that, there’s another very common one for that species that comes to mind). Even some that didn’t make their way to the current commonly used name for a given species are in our public American consciousness (e.g. “caw, caw” for the American crow; notice I said recent because the name “crow” probably did originate from a very old onomatopoeia). So, I’m interested in why some of these mnemonics became so popular, and why they were associated with particular sounds in our linguistic systems.

It’s unsurprising (yet no less nifty, in my opinion) that each spoken language or perhaps dialect has their own onomatopoeic representations of the same sound; for example, take the many representations of dogs barking in different languages (with the acknowledgement that different breeds prevalent in different areas do produce differing sounds, too). Thus, it begs the question of how/why certain syllables enter onomatopoeic representation, when as the previous linked list shows via transliteration, often the same basic sounds are available to a given language. Assuming that most of my readers are English-speaking, consider our onomatopoeia for a dog bark (“bow wow”) vs. the transliterated barks on the list.

Dr. Whitney introduced me to the works of a colleague of her husband, Dr. Alexandra Hui, via a link to her faculty page and I was excited to read some of the titles of her presentations in her CV (examples listed in the works cited); these are presentations I wish I could have listened in on, for sure! I look forward to learning more about the field of ecomusicology, and particularly how it relates to the etymology of our bird names and common mnemonics that persist in teaching today.

Works Cited

  1. Hui, Alexandra. Invited talk, Max Kade Center for European and German Studies, Vanderbilt University, “From Vogelflöte to wichity wichity wichity: Standardizing the sounds of nature in the first decades of the twentieth century,” Nashville, TN, February 3, 2016.
  2. Hui, Alexandra. Invited talk, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Listening to Nature: Representing bird song, 1885-1945,” Atlanta, GA, September 14, 2015.
  3. Hui, Alexandra. “From Silence to Fee-bee fee-bee fee-b-be-be: the place of nature in the sonic environment, 1948-1969,” presented at the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada, April 3-7, 2013.

Birding w/my iPhone

Posted on by Jess

In these days of tech addiction, it seems always a struggle to balance how much I should use my iPhone! “Modern day birding” is no help. 🙂 In fact, it’s the main reason I can’t justify deleting social media from my phone. Ironically, an activity that otherwise immerses us in nature is wrapped up in what some consider a boon on today’s society. Here’s how birding these days is inextricably linked to my iPhone…

  • Camera: documentation through binocular/phone-scoping photography
  • Facebook
    • banner notifications for whenever a friend posts to the state’s rare bird alert group
    • checking the state bird group to see if something didn’t get cross-posted
    • share my sightings with the state birders in a timely manner if need be
  • GroupMe: a text group for quick dissemination of bird info in our area to locals
  • eBird: eliminates the need for pen/paper and instantly submits data records online
  • Sibley
    • my field guide without the bulk, offline accessible
    • the “compare” feature
    • audio sound recordings attached to each species account

So, like many things, there are of course pros and cons. Cell phones have revolutionized info distribution: I’m more likely to see that rare bird with instant alerts that grab my attention when I’m sitting at home. Then, when I go out to look I keep getting instantaneous alerts about where it has moved so I can redirect my course. Therefore, technology helps my life list. It also increases quality of records and amount of info available with camera availability and microphone, which are easier to evaluate by others who weren’t present (and also revisit). I save paper and time by submitting straight to eBird from my phone. Quick reference means more certainty with an ID.

The con really isn’t specific to birding, just the thought that it sort of enables my tech habit. Birding is my top hobby, so I always want to be connected to info sources about it. This can be a slippery slope for me, as it provides an incentive to always have my phone with me and the ringer on. It gives me an excuse to be more tied to it, which makes me more likely to engage in deleterious (or at least unproductive) phone habits. I’m ever having to mindfully check my phone use, especially where I should disconnect!

Burlington Bay: Lake View Park & WTP

Posted on by Jess

Today I fought my cold and went birding in the rain and 50’s°F to look for a Pacific loon reported in the morning. Unfortunately I didn’t find it, but I did find a red-necked grebe on the lake. I walked down to the beach next to the water treatment plant and looked for rocks. After the rain picked up, a red-breasted merganser came into one of the coves. The water is so clear I watched it forage around the rocks underwater before it went back out to deeper water. In trying to get a closer look, I happened upon a lapland longspur at an overlook. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen one in an environment resembling “lapland”! 🙂

Some Tidbits (& Tid-Bytes?) for Linux

Posted on by Jess

I use Google Drive through google-drive-ocamlfuse because it has a native mount, so it looks/acts much like the folder you’d be accustomed to on Windows. However, it’s much slower to sync, so be aware of that (i.e. it doesn’t do what the Windows side does, which is to make a folder and sync on its own time or not at all). So, if you have a big file, the best thing to do still is to upload over the web interface. On that same note, working with files in that folder is still “remote” so though you can map to it, you may find processes a lot slower unless you move the files locally.

Google Earth Image Exporting for Download

Posted on by Jess

We were breaking apart our region of interest to facilitate downloads, but I decided instead to let Google tile the image for me. Some things I noticed: even when providing a region for export, the extent is used as opposed to an actual “clip” of the image. However, when you clip the image earlier in the script, it appears that the extra region given is just filled with 0’s (so perhaps you can download a smaller image of the same extent by providing the clip).

Some weird notes on differences between the *.tifs surely resulting from some part of from what I’ve changed…

  • the mask that makes only 1’s part of the image: in some things I was trying before it fussed at me seemingly because of the mask so by exporting an image of 0’s and 1’s it seemed to help

What results from both is an image of 0’s and 1’s, but oddly “out of the box” the 1st TIFF displays as expected (i.e. in ArcGIS, even though the auto color scheme is stretched, you can see the wetlands). However, the one with the bullet point changes made does not: it looks all black (the value assigned at the 0 end) until you display with discrete colors. Then, the images look analogous. Looking closer, it looks like the original script exports with unsigned integer and 8 bit pixel depth, whereas my new script exports with floating point and 32 but pixel depth. This is making the newer images way bigger (and I think unnecessarily).

Review: Peterson Field Guides Birding by Ear (Eastern/Central)

Posted on by Jess

The 1st disc starts with a “dawn chorus” that is also a nice little quiz once you work your way through the CD’s! The credits mention that it is taken from an album for which I can’t track down an electronic recording, but it has been generated from more recordings than that, based on a quick scan of the track list. I assume the other sounds are from the other cited sources on the CD set booklet.

The intro is dated (1990) with the term “Indian” being used for Native Americans, and a simplistic mention of what the earliest inhabitants of the continent might have gleaned from bird song. From that sparse overview, though, I was led to personally flesh out some of the claims on how Native Americans interacted with birds. For instance, the narrator mentions that bird songs may have signaled food or a predator approach. A concrete example of that is the “chachalaca,” a bird name imitative of its call that originated from Nahuatl-speaking tribes. This bird is still a game bird today. As for predator approach, the first thing that comes to my mind would have been an enemy tribe, and I can think of how birds flush from me in the woods or otherwise respond with vigilance. Birds are also known to mob mountain lions (Morgan & Young 2007).

Here’s the track list…

Disc 1

  1. Introduction
  2. Mimics
  3. Woodpeckers
  4. Sing-songers
  5. Hawks
  6. Chippers & trillers
  7. High-pitchers

Disc 2

  1. Whistlers
  2. Owls & a dove
  3. Simple vocalizations
  4. Complex vocalizations
  5. Name-sayers
  6. Warbling songsters
  7. Commoners

Disc 3

  1. Wood warblers & a warbling wren
  2. Thrushes
  3. Unusual vocalizations
  4. Miscellaneous

This was my introduction to learning bird song, so I’m quite sentimental about this CD set! It taught me a skill I didn’t know I could acquire when I was younger, and helped launch me into my passion of birding. Since it meant a lot to my learning to identify birds, I’m not sure I can be wholly objective about it. It’s my favorite bird song learning tool, though.

I plan to continue to think about how we can learn, and how to teach, bird song. What worked for you? Do you have a favorite resource? Let me know in the comments!

Literature Cited

Tiffany Morgan, Jon Young. 2007. Animal Tracking Basics. Nature.

Brightest Ray Aurora I’ve Ever Seen!

Posted on by Jess

A CHHSS produced the brightest ray aurora I’ve ever seen right at nightfall! As soon as it got dark enough (but before total dark), we could start to see the aurora in the northern sky, so we knew it was going to be good. As it got darker, the green light only got brighter! We made our way to a clearing on Boulder Dam Rd. to see a bright, well-defined ray dancing like a quill pen writing. There was a patch to the east low in the sky, but unfortunately the aurora was quieting down by the time we got to our next destination. When we made it to Boulder Lake, there was still a bright glow that continued as we drove around. The activity took a hiatus as it got closer to our bedtime, so we took it as a sign to go in and warm up. How convenient to have a bright aurora so early in the night! 🙂