Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen, and I'm the director of the
Important Bird Areas Program for Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today, we're here at the Daniel
Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield. And, we're going to be talking about birding by ear.
Tapes and CDs are some of the most useful devices in terms of helping people to learn bird songs
over time. And, there are basically two types. One type is one where the CD or the cassette is
simply a digest of bird songs usually arranged in some order that matches that of a familiar or
popular field guide. For example, this is a set from the Stoke's Field Guide to Birds. And, it's a set
of cassettes that actually plays in sequence the various birds as they appear sequentially in their field
guide. So, if you want to hear, for example, what the Wood Thrush sounds like, you go to the
appropriate cassette or CD, if it's one of the CD sets, and you put it in the player and you queue it up
to that song. And then, you hear the song of the Wood Thrush. Now, this can be a very useful
technique in terms in just going over large numbers of songs, but it's not necessarily the easiest way
to help you sort out differences in songs. Remembering that I said auditory discrimination is one of
the sometimes stumbling blocks for people that are trying to remember bird songs. There are some
other approaches. Something that I find particularly useful is this set called Birding by Ear by the
Petersen Field Guide series. And this is a series of cassettes and or tapes that actually serve as
something of a tutorial in terms of helping the listener distinguish and sort out birds either by using
groups of similar sounding birds or by offering memory clues and crutches that will help you
remember which songs are which. Obviously, all of these component parts of learning bird songs
can be added to, in terms of the time of the year that they're heard, the habitats, the geographical
locations, but the for the moment, we're just going to concentrate on the sounds themselves and the
way that these can be sort of broken out in ways that will help the listener remember what they're
hearing.
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