To those not in the know, one of the stranger aspects of birding is how often a bird is “seen” by its vocalizations alone.
“Wow, you saw a pileated woodpecker?” one might be asked.
“Yeah, up at the preserve . . . it sounded close!”
“Wait. You mean you just heard it and didn’t see it?”
“Uh, yeah.”
– awkward pause –
Recently I had the opportunity to sit in the woods for two weeks at a Land Trust preserve just outside of Huntsville. I was administering two camps, and, among other tasks, my job was to hold down the fort, staying at the pavilion while the campers and their hosts were out on the trail.
Oh, darn.
Staying in one place in the woods isn’t something I do often, and I’ve never done it for the better part of two days, much less two weeks. It was wonderful, mostly because of the birds.
The first day – within the first hour, actually – I caught the briefest glimpse of three birds moving through the trees. No sound, just movement. Larger than a songbird, but I had no idea what they were.
It wasn’t long, though, before I heard them, well out of sight. They were calling for food, seemingly reminding the adult birds that they weren’t quite on their own yet. Young Cooper’s hawks, based on their size. They had the tails and wings of an accipiter, but were larger than a sharp-shinned hawk.
Over the course of the two weeks, I was aware of them almost constantly, and eventually saw them clearly as they moved through the trees overhead. They weren’t the only raptors I heard, though, as red-tailed hawks screamed over the nearby valley and a barred owl hooted deep in the woods. Albeit silently, vultures rode the winds rising from the hills.
But it was a cardinal that I’ll remember for a long time.
Cardinals aren’t especially uncommon here in north Alabama. In fact, they’re a bird I see nearly every day. What made this cardinal special, though, was how the kids came to see him.
I do a bird activity where I’ll ask a group to stand quietly with their eyes closed. In preparation, I’ve asked two or three of the participants to keep their eyes open, and when I point to them simply say, “Hello.” As each person speaks, I ask the group to try to identify the speaker.
It’s not a difficult activity, and the participants usually enjoy their success as they’re able to name each of those who talk. The point, I say, is that each of us has a different voice. We might say similar things, but we’ve learned how to identify one another based on the qualities of our vocalizations.
It’s the same with birds, more often than not. They have different songs, but they also have different voices that we can learn to recognize. I didn’t do that activity during the camp as a group, but there were a few times when I talked about it with some of the kids.
And that cardinal? Well, he was special to me because by the end of each week there were campers who would say, “Mr. Tim, the cardinal’s back!” without the need to actually see him. They knew his voice, and that, to me, was something to celebrate.