How to identify birds by their song: a beginner's method for learning calls

TUREFF• •0

In spring woodland you may hear twenty birds for every one you see. Learning songs and calls opens up all of them, and it is less of a gift than people think. Like learning a language, it comes from repetition and a few good habits. Here is a method that works for most beginners.

Songs and calls are different

Songs are usually longer and more complex, mostly sung by males in the breeding season to hold territory and attract a mate. They are what fills a spring dawn chorus.
Calls are short sounds used all year: contact notes between a pair or flock, alarm calls, begging calls from young. They are often more useful for identification outside spring.

Many birds have several calls, and individuals vary, so aim to recognise the overall character of a sound rather than one exact recording.

Start with the birds you already know

The biggest mistake is trying to learn everything at once. Begin with the five or ten most common birds where you live, the ones you can already recognise by sight. When you see one singing, watch and listen at the same time. Linking the sound to a bird you can see makes it stick far better than listening to recordings alone. Once those are solid, a new sound is easier to notice, because you can say "that is not any of my regulars".

What to listen for

Describe a sound to yourself using these features:

Pitch: high and thin, or low and full? Does it rise, fall or stay level?
Rhythm: steady, speeding up, slowing down, or broken into phrases?
Repetition: is one phrase repeated several times, then changed? Is the same note said over and over?
Tone: whistled and pure, buzzy, harsh, liquid, metallic, rattling?
Length: a short burst, or a long continuous warble?
Pattern: do phrases have a recognisable shape, like a question, a trill or a descending scale?

Describing what you hear in words, even badly, is the step that turns noise into something you remember.

Use mnemonics

Birders have long turned songs into words. Some birds say their own name, like the cuckoo and, in Europe, the chiffchaff. Others have well-known phrases: the great tit's two-note song is often written as "teacher, teacher", and the yellowhammer's as "a little bit of bread and no cheese". Your own made-up phrases work just as well, and often better, because you invented them.

Recordings and apps

Recordings are the best way to review at home. Field guides often come with audio, and there are large online libraries of bird sound recordings shared by recordists around the world. Free identification apps can now listen through a phone's microphone and suggest which birds are singing. They are genuinely useful for narrowing things down, but treat the suggestions as a starting point, not an answer:

they can be fooled by distant, overlapping or unusual sounds
they can suggest species that are rare or absent in your area
relying on them entirely means you never learn the sound yourself

A good habit is to guess first, then check with the app, and then look for the bird to confirm. Many apps and websites also show sound as a spectrogram, a picture of pitch over time. Learning to read the shape of a song on a spectrogram is a surprisingly effective way to fix it in memory.

A practice routine

Pick three common birds a week and listen to recordings of each song and main call.
Go out and find those three in the field.
Sit in one place for ten minutes and try to count how many different birds you can hear.
Record unknown sounds on your phone to check later or to ask about.
Revisit the early spring songs each year, as most people get rusty over the winter.

Be careful with playback

Playing recordings loudly to draw a bird out can stress it, especially in the breeding season. Listen to recordings through headphones or quietly at home, and see the guide on birding ethics in this room for more. Which bird song took you longest to learn, or which mystery sound are you still trying to name? Describe it in the comments and others may recognise it.