A hundred years ago, a day in the field identifying birds meant shooting them and looking them up. The introduction of good quality optics at reasonable prices made birdwatching much easier on the birds. The original Christmas Count was a real innovation - taking the original tradition of going out and shooting as many birds as possible and changing it to counting them without killing them. Radical!
Field guides like Roger Tory Peterson's helped even more, as birders were able to get a look at field marks (i.e., characteristics that could be seen in the field through binoculars, rather than details that could only be seen in-hand).
All well and good for looking at birds but, as we all know, they don't always show themselves well. Birding by ear is a key skill to develop if you want to get to know more about who's flitting around you. With the advent of devices like the iPod, birders are finally getting the audio equivalent of binoculars and field guides.
Dawn Chorus at our cabin, which inspired the name for this series.
I'm going to use the term iPod somewhat generically here to refer to iPods, iPhones, and any other small device that lets you run apps and/or record sounds (including cameras that do video).
I'll start with apps - it would be great to get a discussion going below to compare and contrast, for those thinking of getting one (or more). The whole reason I got an iPod in the first place was for apps, not for music. I like to listen to music when I'm at home or in the car, but when I'm out elsewhere in the world, I don't usually feel the need - I'd rather listen to the what's going on around me - so I've never had much interest in an iPod before now. The various birding apps were the main draw, put also things like Brushes... but I digress. Anyway, many friends have iBird and it seems pretty great, but I got the Sibley app for myself. Partly because it seemed smart to have something different than my friends, just like we carry a few different field guides when we're out, but mostly because I really like my paper Sibley.
You lose a few things when you give up the books - can't look at several species at once, can't flip through images quickly, can't write directly on the images - but you gain a lot, too. For one thing, it's great to have something so small that it can fit in pretty much any pocket you've got. Even though you can't write/draw on the images, you can make really extensive field notes that you'll have with you anytime. And, best of all in my book, you have access to audio of almost every species in the guide... most with several types of vocalizations, and geographical variations. There is a big difference between reading about the California Quail's "Chi-CA-go" call and hearing it for yourself.
Some birds' calls (and displays) are completely distinctive, but no written description does 'em justice.
Learning from the guides is the first step, but you can put the recording features to good use for birding, as well. It's useful for identification, documentation, and learning.
If you're trying to confirm the identity of an unfamiliar bird and it's singing or calling or chipping or making any kind of noise at all, it's great to be able to record it. There were so many times over the years that I was absolutely sure that I'd remember a bird's song, especially if I made some sort of notes about it, but then nothing seemed to match when I to make sense of it at the end of the day (or at the end of a multi-day trip). In this video, you can hear two songs that could reasonably be described as two notes, followed by a downward rapid trill... yet they couldn't be more different.
I might remember to say that it was two sharp notes, roughly the same, followed by the trill, or two long clear rising notes followed by the trill. But I might not. Listening to the recording though, it's obvious that it's two entirely different songs. With the recording, it's easy to tell that there was a California Towhee and a White-crowned Sparrow singing in front of my house. (And if you know your white crowns, you'd know which dialect he was singing, as well.)
The nice thing about recording song for ID is that you don't have to see the bird - the same thing that's nice about birding by ear - you can just hold up the device, point it in the general direction, and hit record. Even if you don't see the bird, you see the habitat, and that's good for learning, too. Eventually you put voices with habitats, so you know that next time you're in coastal scrub or oak woodland or freshwater marsh, these are the birds you'll be likely to encounter.
You can also use your iPod for documentation. Certainly for documenting rarities, but also for documenting behaviors. There are certain things you read about and hear about, but it's cool to have a record of seeing or hearing those events. Owls dueting, maybe. Jays imitating hawks. Or maybe crows mobbing a hawk.
I'm a pretty-good-but-not-amazing birder. I'm really good at some things (like hawks), really weak on some things (like gulls), and reasonably good at most of the rest. One thing that I'm a little above average on is birding by ear. As with visual identification, one of the best ways to learn is to study the most common birds, and then use them to compare and contrast to learn other birds. Recording birds around your home and favorite birding spots can help you learn a lot faster.
I can't find my video of a singing robin (it figures) but I learned Black-headed Grosbeak (the main song in the video above) by remembering that it sounds "like a robin on speed". Western Tanagers sound like robins who've spent a lot of time in the bars, so they sing with a whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp. Record what's around you, listen to it until it becomes familiar, and use that to build up your knowledge of song. Even if you can't ID every voice you hear, you're more likely to recognize when something's unfamiliar, which means you'll have better luck finding new and/or uncommon birds.
Last, but not least, sometimes it's just fun to record something. You can tell by the soundtrack that it was windy as hell, but these pelicans are utterly unperturbed. They're getting all of their feathers in order... no windblown look for them. It was fun to watch them as they were doing it, and it was fun to look at it again later.