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Birding

Birding by ear takes plenty of work, but the rewards last a lifetime

by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal June 24, 2020

written by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal

Second of two parts

After months of hoping to find this outlaw of a bird, finally, we were close. Very close.

A male Hooded Warbler in Pisgah National Forest / Photos by Anders Gyllenhaal

Coming from a dense stand of old-growth trees in the Pisgah National Forest in Western North Carolina, I could hear this miniature Robin Hood galloping along on his horse. Then he’d toss his hat in the air with a triumphant – but very quick — “Woo-hoo.”

That’s how I visualize the Hooded Warbler singing – three gallops followed by a two-beat, joyous crescendo. It’s is my trick to remember the difference between this warbler’s song and any of his 36 tiny wood-warblering cousins.

If you clump them all together, the 37 warblers that are likely to sing, chip and chirp in the eastern half of the country can make more than a hundred sounds. But the cool thing is, every one of those sounds is unique to just one bird.

When they’re camouflaged by dense foliage, which songbirds often are, the only way to tell if a particular bird is close is to hear it. Suddenly your odds for finding – and photographing — the bird increase exponentially. (For a recording of the Hooded Warbler, click here.)

Like learning a language

At the heart of it, birdsong is a foreign language. Every bird speaks its own, minus the mockingbird and a few other mimics. More than 100 species can be nearby at any given time, depending on the season and habitat. The resulting cacophony at dawn in springtime is beautiful, astonishing and overwhelming.

June 24, 2020 3 comments

Birding Birding research

Coming soon: A foolproof way you can instantly ID that birdsong

by Anders Gyllenhaal June 19, 2020

written by Anders Gyllenhaal

First of two parts

For more than a year, a CD of birdsongs was stuck deep inside our car stereo and would start playing without warning on every drive. By the time we finally dislodged the CD, Beverly had committed almost all the songs to memory while I was still struggling to tell the Tufted Titmouse from the Song Sparrow.

The art of birding by ear has always separated the truly gifted birder from the rest of us. But help is on the way for those of us who struggle. A scientific research project designed to track birds by their sounds has turned out to have a wonderfully practical use for the common birder.

It can decipher birdsongs the way the Shazam app identifies music.

We’re devoting two weeks on Flying Lessons to the art and science of birdsongs. Today’s post looks at modern research’s advances in tracking songs and calls. Next week, Beverly will tell her story of how learning specific songs can vastly enrich your birding — and she’ll share ideas on how to make progress.

The latest form of the Haikubox. The poetic name is intentionally vague so that future versions might be used for a wider variety of research purposes.

The most interesting development on the science front is a new device, called the Haikubox, coming out later this year. You’ll set it up in your yard or porch, and it will identify every birdsong within reach of the recorder. Then it will send a stream of IDs to your computer or phone, providing a comprehensive census of nearby bird life.

“We think we have a good idea,’’ said David Mann, head of Loggerhead Instruments, a small Florida company working with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to develop the device. “It’s going to be a great learning tool.’’

At the same time, smartphone apps that deliver precise IDs are now becoming available. Unlike early versions of these apps, the latest draw on thousands of songs and call samples that make them far more accurate.

Cornell Lab Director John Fitzpatrick

John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab, says people have been clamoring for just such a tool for years. “If I had a dollar for every time somebody asked when there’d be a Shazam for birds, I’d be able to fund all this research with that alone,’’ he said.

The lab itself is behind much of this progress.

Cornell established its Center for Conservation Bioacoustics to apply the study of sound to bird research. Since birds are so vocal, scientists found they can track migration, breeding and overall populations by recording their calls and songs. The field took off when tech companies started sharing their software for deciphering photos and text for internet searches.

Over the past several years, Cornell and an array of academic and commercial partners perfected the recording technology, sound equipment and artificial intelligence applications used to analyze the bird recordings. Today, Cornell has an archive of 6,000 species it can identify through bioacoustics.

The beauty of bioacoustics is that it enables research in places too remote to easily reach, in rain forests and on distant islands, for instance, where scientists are studying endangered species. (Here’s a link to our story on this science that ran in the Washington Post in January.)

The same research mechanics are powering the tools for deciphering songs and calls for birders.

Holger Klinck with one of the devices that collects bird calls and songs

The Haikubox, which looks like an oversized wooden birdhouse, will keep an ongoing record of every song and call it collects. It converts the sounds to spectrographs and compares them against its library of sounds. Depending on the weather and noise levels, it will collect sounds up to several hundred feet away.

“You can put it in your backyard and hook it up to your wireless network,’’ said Holger Klinck, director of the Cornell bioacoustics center. “It will continually detect species 24/7.

“It’s a gateway to bring new people into the world of birds and get excited about it,’’ he said.

Loggerhead’s David Mann

Loggerhead’s David Mann said he’s not exactly sure who all might be likely to buy one of the devices, which are expected to cost under $500. The most likely customers are birders, but he hopes it will appeal to all kinds of people with an interest in the environment.

As he tests out a version of the Haikubox at his home in Sarasota, Florida, he found he was suddenly much more interested in the birds coming through. “I found I was paying more attention,’’ he said. “Since you get real time feedback. I’d hear something and say, ‘What was that?’ You can go and look.’’

Song Sleuth app

The Haikubox joins a long line of birdsong recognition systems, most of which are apps that tend to work for only a small sample of songs — if at all. Here’s a review of some of the early versions, and here’s one of a popular app called Song Sleuth that’s draws on a library of 200 species and gives you a choice of likely contenders.

BirdNET app

Cornell’s own app called BirdNET has set a new standard for accuracy, since it draws on the lab’s huge library of sounds. BirdNET’s Android version has been downloaded a million times. Its Apple version was supposed to be available last year, but has been slow to reach market. Cornell makes its research available for free to other makers, so the quality of these apps should get steadily better.

Holger Klinck, looking over the system used to test the bioacoustic network set up around the lab’s campus

This is good news for birders – but also for birds.

The results of the sightings on the apps, the Haikubox and whatever other products come along all help feed Cornell’s research with data on where birds are and where they’re going.

Like the eBird apps, which birders use to record the birds they see, the data has fueled the world’s most successful citizen science project and has helped track bird populations all over the world. The birdsong identifiers will add to that store of knowledge – and will be even more accurate because of the precision of these devices.

“It’s all about developing methods that allow us to do a comprehensive job of assessing what’s going on in remote areas. That’s the end goal,’’ said Klinck. “The data is what drives conservation.’’

Loggerhead Instruments is testing the Haikubox with a network of beta users around the county. We’re going to be one of these testers starting this summer and will post our experiences on Flying Lessons from time to time.

And finally, here’s a video that gives you a sense of what you see on your computer as birds are identified by the Haikubox:

June 19, 2020 2 comments

Birding Featured

The magic of birds in motion

by Liza Gyllenhaal June 1, 2020

written by Liza Gyllenhaal

We’ve been watching the birds return to their summer homes these past few weeks. One morning, an explosion of bright orange hit the living room window as a pair of claws scrabbled at the iron mullions, trying to gain a foothold.

An American Robin collects construction materials

It was a Baltimore Oriole, come back to the place that had offered free orange halves the year before. I quickly nailed fresh oranges to the porch post and soon both a male and female (not to mention a sapsucker and red squirrel) were pecking at the fruit.

The orioles are nesting high up in the trees facing the house now. An American Robin has built her nest in the eaves of our barn. It’s a large, somewhat messy affair with straw, which I use to cover the vegetable beds in the winter, spilling down through the rafters.

American Robin

A clan of quarrelsome Blue Jays has commandeered the towering hemlocks by the garage where, last year, the hummingbirds nested. I’m not sure where they’ve moved to now; they seem to be coming from all directions as they swoop down to hover at the feeders.

Ruby-throated Hummingbird

The other evening at dusk I was standing in the dining room, looking out at the back garden, when a hummingbird stopped in mid-flight, wings beating 80 times a second, and stared back at me for what seemed like a long time. Who are you? it seemed to be asking. What are you doing inside when there are so many wonderful places out here to nest?

Blue Jay

Part of the joy of bird-watching is seeing them in flight. The hawk circling high above a field. An owl flapping silently into the woods at dusk. A crow pumping through the air on some purposeful errand.

Recently, I came upon a poem that I think captures the magic of birds in motion — far better than ordinary prose. It’s written by the American poet Li-Young Lee who was born in Djakarta, Indonesia, to parents who were political exiles from China. His father had been the personal physician to Mao Zedong.

I think it’s Lee’s innate understanding of these different cultures and languages that gives his poetry such spiritual grace and resonance.

One Heart

Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.

Li-Young Lee began writing as a student at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of five books of poetry and a memoir and has been recipient of almost all the major poetry awards.

This post is republished from Liza Gyllenhaal’s “Writer in the Garden,” an exquisite website devoted to the intersection of gardening, nature and poetry. Liza, who is Anders’ sister, is a novelist and avid gardener, who writes about life and nature in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. We love it when she takes up the topic of birds, or goes close enough that we can publish her pieces on Flying Lessons.

June 1, 2020 0 comment

Birding Birding research Breeding and Nesting

Hatchlings! Grasshopper Sparrow rescue mission finds a dose of hope

by Anders Gyllenhaal May 19, 2020

written by Anders Gyllenhaal

The decades-long push to save the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow, which was on course to be the next bird to go extinct in the U.S., got its first hopeful news in years this week: An experiment to restore the sparrow population with captive-bred birds has produced its first fledglings in the wild.

Florida Grasshopper Sparrow chicks in their nest. Photo by Sarah Biesemier

More than a dozen chicks and fledglings, along with eggs in a number of nests, have been spotted in the grasslands south of Orland where a coalition of agencies is staging a last-ditch rescue mission. “We’re very excited,” said Juan Oteyza, the state biologist who oversees the project. “It’s not only working, but it’s working well.”

The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow’s population dropped to just 30 breeding pairs in the four Central Florida locations where the last of the species lives. That prompted an ambitious campaign to start breeding captive sparrows to release into the wild. Among the questions that loomed over the effort was whether the birds would have the innate abilities to survive and whether they would be capable of breeding and raising a new generation of sparrows.

State biologist Juan Oteyza

For weeks, researchers have been watching the stretch of Florida prairie where about 150 of the sparrows were released last year and this spring. The birds are tagged with a set of bands that identify them, so the staffers can track every one of the individual birds that hold the key to the species’ future.

The birds, most of them about a year old, began to match up with mates, some with wild sparrows and some with other captive-bred birds. Researchers could tell from their songs that the birds had started mating. Then they began to find nests with eggs in them. The first six or so fledglings are now beginning to leave the nests and head out on their own, said Oteyza, a research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

Our story on the arduous path leading up to the release of the sparrows appeared two weeks ago in The Washington Post (and here’s a companion piece on the unique nature of the project that ran on Flying Lessons.). The effort is part of a number of scientific interventions around the world to stave off precipitous declines in various species. The sparrow, though a small, nondescript bird without much star power, is a symbol of the unique Florida grasslands.

This isn’t the first captive-bred experiment in the U.S., but the sparrow’s declines has made it a difficult case that scientists admit they still don’t fully understand.

May 19, 2020 0 comment

Birding Featured How we're birding now

Flocks of new birders are turning out, which should be good news for birds

by Anders Gyllenhaal May 6, 2020

written by Anders Gyllenhaal

In the weeks leading up to Saturday’s Global Big Day, the eBird team at the Cornell Lab noticed something they’d never seen before.

The eBird smartphone app that has become the standard for filing bird sightings was flooded with new users. That was followed by tens of thousands of fresh checklists and thousands of reports from back yards across North America. In parts of the world, eBird observations jumped as much as 2,000 percent between this April and last.

Jenna Curtis

With much of the world at a near standstill from the coronavirus, it wasn’t surprising that people trapped at home would try birding to pass the time. But the dimensions of surge were so big, scientists guiding the project are hard at work to make sense of what they they’re seeing.

“We’re waiting kind of cautiously before we decide what we can really do with this,’’ said Jenna Curtis, eBird project co-leader at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “But it’s very exciting.’’

Pages from the eBird mobile app / Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The statistics tell one part of the story: eBird checklists, which birders file to Cornell based on the species they identify (by either seeing or hearing the bird), increased nearly 50 percent over a year ago. Some of the specific elements birders send in, such as bird audios and photos, saw similar or even greater increases.

As a result, sometime this month, Cornell says eBird will reach a whopping 800 million total observations on birds – for a sudden boomlet at the world’s largest citizen science effort.

The other part of the story is how the surge plays out for birds. It’s almost certain to be a good thing, but it will take some time to know exactly how.

Is the quarantine giving birth to a new wave of birders, or will interest fade when schools and stores reopen? Will the avalanche of data lead to new discoveries about species, particularly those closest to where people live? Will the jump in birders strengthen conservation and raise public support for protections?

Flying Lessons: One of the intriguing elements of the eBird surge is what it tells us about the relationship between birds and people. While we travel in separate orbits, we react to each other in a number of ways, such as how our activities influence bird songs, and the way people are turning to birds in a troubling time.

May 6, 2020 0 comment

Birding Birds stories How we're birding now Photography

Grounded: A world-traveling bird expert brings the migration to his own back yard

by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal April 30, 2020

written by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal

Part of a series

In his job as president of American Bird Conservancy, Mike Parr spends most of his time making sure millions of migrating birds survive the trip – and have a safe place to flourish on either side of the journey.

Mike Parr on one of the birding expeditions he leads all over the hemisphere. Photo by Bruce Beehler.

For Mike, there’s never really a “normal” migration by most people’s standards. His spring migration might include a visit to the upper coast of Texas, a swing over to New York’s Central Park, a trek to Northwest Ohio for the Biggest Week in American Birding festival, and finally, the marathon World Series of Birding in Cape May, N.J.

So how is Mike birding now, in the midst of a pandemic lock down?

“I went from the world is my canvas to the back yard is my canvas,” said Mike. (See my note at the end of this post for a summary of the conservancy’s work and mission.) “I work and travel constantly, so backyard birding has never been a thing for me. But I thought, if I’m going to do it, I want to make it super.”

Mike and Charlie Parr work on their backyard birding wonderland. Photo by Tacha Coleman Parr.

Since mid March, Mike has set out to transform a small yard on the outer edges of Washington, D.C., into a birding wonderland.

He’s installed six hopper feeders, five suet feeders, three hummingbird feeders and four wren houses.

There’s also an “Oriole feeder” of orange sections impaled on a tree branch. A fake owl had to be added to deter squirrels that kept attacking his massive container of birdseed.

“I’ve basically tried to create a bird Airbnb,” he said. “I want to know how many birds can I see in a small yard in Washington, D.C.”

By the end of April Mike had logged 54 species, but he’s hoping for 75.

“I might get there,” he said. “I thought it would be a bit better by now but it’s been a late spring. The winds haven’t been perfect and we’ve had a lot of rain. But the dam is going to burst here soon.”

Charlie Parr in what may look like a car, but is actually a mobile bird blind in their back yard. Photo by Mike Parr.

When that happens, Mike and his 12-year-old son Charlie will be ready. The pair created a “water feature” consisting of an old fire pit with a sprinkler held in place by rocks and shells. The key component is a piece of bark for the birds to land on.

“We spent a lot of time setting it up so we can get nice photos,” Mike said.

The water feature was strategically placed adjacent to the family’s old car in the back driveway.

White-breasted Nuthatch / Photo by Mike Parr

“It looks like a car but it’s not,” he said. “It’s a mobile bird blind.”

Charlie is his dad’s partner in crime.

“He sits in the back seat and I sit in the front seat, and we can drive the car 12 feet in either direction to get a really great photo.”

The late spring has given them a chance to practice on common species like finches and sparrows before the fast-flying warblers arrive.

April 30, 2020 0 comment

Birding Birding guidance How we're birding now

Feeling trapped in your yard? This tool puts the magic back in migration.

by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal April 10, 2020

written by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal

Part of a series

Birding this spring means we’re stuck in our own back yards. But it doesn’t have to be boring, said Jenna Curtis, a project manager at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who works with engagement among eBird users.

Jenna is a consistent and persistent birder, a role model whose species sightings can seem to grow at a viral rate. She could also be considered an extreme birder, someone willing to spend a day sick at sea to push her life list past the 1,000 mark. And now, just like us, Spring Migration 2020 finds Jenna mostly at home, watching the same-old, same-old birds.

Jenna Curtis

Jenna and I had a phone chat about this situation yesterday. She’s sheltering in place in Ithaca, home of Cornell Lab and smack in the middle of the most dangerous state on the planet right now.

Before Jenna and I got to the crux of our conversation – how to use eBird to add depth and excitement to birding from home — I could not resist telling her about my Barred Owl that hoots from the nearby woods every afternoon between 4:30 and 5.

“Oh my gosh. You have an owl?” Her voice jumped nearly an octave. As I delivered the details of how I finally spotted the owl and how proud I felt, Jenna, bless her heart, followed along without missing a breathless beat.

Our backyard Barred Owl swivels its head our way.

So far this chat with Jenna was the best birding moment I’d had all week.

One of the great joys of birding is sharing the experience, finding a community of like-minded people who know what it feels like to crave the high-pitched, barely audible sound of itty-bitty warblers decked out in the glorious garb of spring.

I didn’t realize how much I’ve been yearning for my birding tribe in the midst of this godforsaken wilderness – a wilderness that’s not nearly wild enough to find the warblers I still need to add to my own life list.

“It’s hard to make the choice to stay at home right now rather than be with everyone else at your local hotspot for the migration,” Jenna said. “But you’re doing the right thing by following your local health regulations. Everyone needs to be following their local regulations right now.”

Flying Lesson: Almost anywhere you are happen to be — including stuck at home during a pandemic — at least some birds will find you there. In a time of anxiety and uncertainly, a dose of nature is good medicine. Here are some ways you can make the most of wherever you’re birding now.

April 10, 2020 1 comment

Birding Birds stories Migration Photography

In a world turned upside-down, birds can help restore some sanity

by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal April 2, 2020

written by Beverly Mills Gyllenhaal

Second of two parts

There’s not a lot to be optimistic about during the virus meltdown, but here’s something bird enthusiasts can celebrate: The news is full of suggestions that people take up birdwatching to battle stay-at-home boredom and anxiety.

As birders all know, the more people get interested in birds, the more likely they are to want our state and federal government agencies to protect them.

A Carolina Chickadee among the buds outside our window / Photos by Anders Gyllenhaal

I’m still giddy over the Slate magazine article a few days ago with the headline: “You Have No Choice But to Become a Backyard Birder.”

Slate’s article is a terrific, step-by-step guide on how to morph from a person who sort of likes birds into one who could possibly become a serious birder one day. Click here for the story.

This isn’t the only “Bird Now” headline landing in my Google feed. I’ve seen similar stories from local radio and television stations, newspapers and news websites.

“Riotous Explosion of Life Awaits Birding Newbies in This Stay-at-home Era” proclaims the March 28 headline from NPR station WHYY in Philadelphia.

“[Birding] is a time-tested way of putting things back in perspective and realizing that life does go on and will go on,” said Jeffrey Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, in the WHYY interview. “It feels like a perfect fit.” Here’s that story.

April 2, 2020 0 comment

Birding Birding research Conservation Photography

An unexpected discovery: These birds are a lot more like us than we knew

by Anders Gyllenhaal March 17, 2020

written by Anders Gyllenhaal

When researchers built a giant grid of radio receivers for tracking birds in the sandy fields south of Orlando, they hoped to find new ways of protecting the struggling Florida Scrub-Jay.

Florida Scrub-Jay / Photos by Anders Gyllenhaal

They discovered something else along the way. Birds are a lot more like people than either species might have thought.

The grid concept is something new in bird research. By setting up receivers throughout the Scrub-Jay’s territory, and then equipping the birds with solar-powered tracking devices, biologists can follow the birds’ every move all day long for months at a time.

The research is still in its early stages, but some intriguing behaviors have jumped out:

Like teenagers everywhere, the young jays form tight cliques of favorite friends. Like many parents, adult jays try to build enough territory to pass sections along to their offspring. When the birds start looking for mates, they come up with ways of sizing up the competition – and sometimes coming between couples.

Archbold biologist Reed Bowman looks over a map of the Scrub-Jays’ territory

“It turns out that they have very complicated social lives that aren’t that different from ourselves,’’ said Reed Bowman, a research biologist at the Archbold Biological Center that has been studying the Florida jays for decades.

The Florida Scrub-Jay is one of the state’s most popular birds and an uncommon segment of the jay species. They’re found only in Florida. – and now only in a few central Florida counties. They’re unusually friendly toward humans. Proponents have pushed, so far without success, to make the Scrub-Jay the state bird in place of the more ordinary Mockingbird.

Researcher Young Ha Suh / Photo by Reed Bowman

But they’ve been in a long, steady decline, mostly because the jays are so dependent on dry, elevated and mostly treeless habitat that has steadily been lost to development. Wildlife managers are trying to learn how to protect the last 4,000 Florida Scrub-Jays.

The Archbold researchers believe the key is understanding how the birds use what’s left of their habitat. They want to know how the young birds approach breeding and what wildlife managers can do to create the best environment for the jays.

At first, researchers thought they could conduct this research by simply watching the jays in the field. “But you could only track a handful of birds at a time,’’ said Young Ha Suh, a doctoral candidate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the project’s lead researcher. “It was really time-consuming.’’

March 17, 2020 0 comment