Photo above: Dark-eyed Junco by Rex Guichard
By Susan Cooke
I recognize eagles. I watch them soar, circling upward, from my living room windows. From my third-floor condo, they look like they are heading into the clouds. Occasionally, a smaller bird, usually with what I think of as a courageous friend, chases them away. Are those crows? Sparrows? Hawks? I have absolutely no idea, to me, they are nearly all LBB (little brown/black birds).
In spring, I see small birds with flashes of yellow. They flit in and out of the tree in front of my windows, frequently taking a quick detour from the tree limbs to my deck. They land on the railing, and then head back to the safety and shade of the tree. I decided they must be Goldfinches. It helps that the Goldfinch is the state bird of Washington, so that really clinched my uninformed decision.
If you consider broad classifications, I recognize owls. I wouldn’t know a Barred Owl from a Barn Owl. Owls are large and unusual looking. It makes it much easier to see them. Clearly, my knowledge of our avian companions is neither deep nor wide.
So, why was I signed up for an Audubon class? I clearly have not had a lifelong interest or fascination with birds. I can name, at most, twenty birds. I can recognize about ten. The expression “LBB” was invented for people like me. All birds look alike to me. Birds that are colorful, like the Steller's Jay, cardinal, or Wood Ducks, stand out enough to be noticed and recognized. Otherwise. I simply can’t see them. And I’m not about to spend $1000 on great binoculars in the hopes of looking for wildlife that I can’t even name.
I hike. Walking up trails, through the trees in the spring, I hear bird song. I had decided they are all robins, because that way I can give them a name and feel like I’m more at home in the woods. Except, there are a lot of different bird songs, different calls. Who am I kidding? They can’t all be robins! But then, what are they? Still not buying $1000 binoculars to figure it out.
In March, the Seattle Times had an article on birds in the spring, and it included links to the songs of each bird (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/9-common-seattle-backyard-birds-to-listen-for-in-the-spring/). Even I, a person with absolutely no ability to find birds, might be able to recognize just one bird that I hear. So, I found the Pilchuck Audubon class, Who’s calling, please? Introducing ‘birding by ear.’ Perfect. The course promised we would learn the song of one bird. It suggested we might learn more, but really, I felt learning one bird was do-able. Not five, not ten. Just one bird.
My sister, Joyce, and I logged onto the online class and our instructor, Whitney Neufeld-Kaiser, a Master Birder, introduced us to the junco. I had no idea what a junco was, where they lived, or what they looked like. She played their calls, showed us spectrographs of the calls, and took us to the Cornell website (https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/) and to xeno-canto (https://www.xeno-canto.org/) to hear more. By the end of the class, I knew that if I walked in the woods and heard a sound like the ringing of an old-fashioned land line, brrrrring, brrriiing, brrrring, it was a junco.
Suddenly, I heard juncos everywhere! On a hike in the Redmond Watershed, walking up the street by my house, simply everywhere. Joyce and I were doing an easy walk along through a neighborhood. I heard a sound, was it a junco? Two women were walking towards us, and just as they got near us, we crossed the street, so we could hear the bird better. With Covid on everyone’s mind, they called to us, “We didn’t mean to make you cross the street!”
“Oh, no. We were listening to that bird and wanted to get closer. We think it’s a junco.” We explained about the telephone like calls. Now two more women can identify a junco.
Last week, a friend who has become an avid birder sent a picture of a bird enjoying her water feature on her deck.
“What is the bird?” I messaged back to her.
“A junco,” she texted.
Ah, I still don’t know a junco when I see one. But if, when, I hear the sound in the woods, I know a junco when I hear it.
Dark-eyed Junco by Mick Thompson
Dark-eyed Junco by Mick Thompson
Dark-eyed Junco by Mick Thompson