Sparrows of South Calgary with Friends of Fish Creek

For this week's birding course our group met in the extreme south of the city.  Here the suburbs are quickly consuming the prairie along the Bow River and the landscape is rapidly changing.  A state-of-the-art water treatment plant has just been completed next to the new freeway bridge.  Two housing developments are being expanded, one on each side of the river, and a new golf course abuts the provincial park boundary.  We explored a strip of land that is being preserved against the river, where there are some decent sized islands providing refuges of habitat for various species.  Here's a map of our route:


View Pine Creek FFCPP Birding in a larger map

We enjoyed observing Ospreys and Bald Eagles nesting and feeding along the river but the highlight was probably the sparrows.  There were four species observed by the group and we had great practice identifying them by sight and sound.  I've included a photo of each along with an embedded sound file from the Xeno-Canto public archive.

The Clay-coloured Sparrow is often tricky to see and is easily identified by its call - a series of insect-like buzzes.  The unstreaked breast, grey nape, and buffy feathers behind and below the eye are good field marks visible in this photo.

There were lots of Savannah Sparrows, which are more visible than the other species often singing from the tops of fence posts or grass stalks.  Their song, a mixture of chirps and buzzing sounds tells us to "take, take it EAAAZZZY"!
 

This Song Sparrow popped into view close to the Clay-coloured pictured above.  Why isn't this another Savannah Sparrow? The lack of the yellow spot above the eye, the longer tail and the larger bill are all reasonable field marks but again what is distinctive is its voice.  These birds start with 2-4 distinct tones and then sings a lazy trill of notes.
  

The Vesper Sparrow was our last sparrow of the morning.  I heard one singing far off in the distance and eventually another member of the group picked out a bird several hundred metres away on top of a rock.  After setting up the scope we were able to confirm Vesper Sparrow with a similarly fuzzy image to the one above (which was actually taken near Strathmore on last year's May species count).  The song of the Vesper Sparrow often starts with one or two pairs of clear even-toned notes followed by a fast musical trill.Larkwire rather charmingly translates this as "oh, oh, my, my, it's-such-a-beautiful-day"

An Engaging and Effective Way to Learn Birdsong

I’ve recently discovered a fantastic tool for learning and reviewing birdsong.  Larkwire is an online, browser based learning tool developed by three birders working out of Seattle.

Larkwire Home Screen, showing my progress in Beginner mode after just a couple of sessions

The format of the software is straightforward with two "game" modes.  For learning new songs, Gallery mode presents four birds and then plays a random recording of one species – the software has several different recordings for each species.  Clicking on the correct bird rewards you with a green bird symbol and five correct identifications of each species will complete your “lesson”.

Gallery Mode - clearly you aren't going to be identifying these birds by their looks alone

There are a couple of ways to access more information about the birds.  In Gallery mode you can change the view to give a quick summary of the birds you are learning.   Additionally, you can select one of the groups of birds on the side and the same information is available along with clickable links to the songs of all the species in that group.  Lastly you can simply search the entire database for specific birds.

A sample information screen - the boxes with the state/province codes are the song samples  and you can select species

The second game mode, used for review, is Field.  This game presents you with a blank screen and plays a song.  You tell the program if you know it and are then shown the bird.  Honesty is required, as you must tell the computer whether or not you were correct.  The game seems to adapt as you learn, playing missed birds more frequently until you have mastered them and throwing in the occasional known or new bird to keep you on your toes.

The really clever part about Larkwire is the personalization.  The program remembers previous sessions and progress so every time you start up it reviews previously learned species in Field mode, initially in small groups then in progressively larger groupings.  Your identification skills for each species are represented by the colour of that bird’s icon on the right side of the screen.  The colour progresses from green to blue to gold as you improve but also fades when you haven’t used the program or reviewed that species.  Overall progress bars on the homescreen track each colour level within the overall categories of Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Master.

A screen capture from Gallery mode when I first started using Larkwire - green birds are ones I had learned in Gallery mode, blue are ones that I had mastered to a certain degree of proficiency in Field Mode. 

I don’t have the birding experience or expertise to comment in detail on the bird song provided here, although based on the biographies of the programmers I would assume it is accurate and carefully selected.  What I can vouch for, as a teacher, is the solid learning theory behind the software – this program is sure to improve the speed and accuracy with which you identify birds by ear, whatever your general birding experience may be.  Walking to school the other day I heard a House Finch singing and immediately recognized it as such.  I realize that example will seem kind of pathetic to many birders but my birding by ear really is that bad and my recent progress is entirely due to this software.

That last great thing about Larkwire is that it’s a great deal!  For $25 you get 344 species and your account.  That’s less money than my set of Stokes Bird Song CDs cost me and, while there are far fewer species, there really isn’t a straightforward way to actively learn from CDs  - they are fundamentally a passive media.

Areas for improvement?  Wiser birders than I may quibble about regional variations, song selections, and intraspecies variability but, in my ignorance, I would only long for a stand alone version for Apple iOS and OS X.  An "offline" version might also include more intuitive and prominent personalization lists as well - the ability to create and save my own review lists would be handy.  In the meantime, I can spend a little time every day getting ready for those spring sparrows and warblers that are winging their way to Alberta as I conclude this post.

Book of the Month*: Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed by Simon Barnes

One of my birding goals for this year is to learn better identification of birds by their vocalizations.  With this in mind, the first birding book I picked to read this year was this little paean to the joys of birding by ear.  The author, Simon Barnes, is the head sports writer for the Times newspaper in England, so one would expect this book to be well written.  He is also an enthusiastic and knowledgeable birder, so one would equally expect it to be comprehensive and accurate.  I can vouch that it is both of these and the real question that you should therefore ask is “why should a North American birder read a book about identifying British birds?”

The reason is simple –  Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed is not primarily an identification guide to birdsong but rather (and I cannot put this more succinctly than the dust jacket does) “a way of hearing”.  The book is organized around notions of "time and place" and:

In order to recognize and begin to understand birds, you need to recognize and understand the times and the places.  And that works the other way round as well, creating a rather pleasingly virtuous circle, in which each visit to a place adds to your understanding of its bird, and each acknowledgement of a bird adds to your understanding of its place.

So birding is all about context, and birdsong provides us with clues about species, their behaviour and habitats.  It makes sense then, that the book is structured around 5 seasons of birding.  “First Spring” moves on to summer, fall, then winter, and ends with “Second Spring”, by which time Barnes is confident that you will, by immersing yourself in birds, become fluent in the language of the common species around you.  The free podcast that accompanies the book provides the soundtrack to these seasons, although I confess to not listening to it entirely – my head is struggling with Alberta species without 40 or so of Britain’s birds competing for space.

Putting aside the specifics of the songs themselves then, the North American birder will enjoy this book for three reasons.  Firstly, it reinforces the importance of birdsong and behaviour in identification.  While we will not be presented with the dilemma of willow warbler vs. chiffchaff in Calgary, the principles of using song for identification work equally well for distinguishing, say, willow and alder flycatchers.

The Chiffchaff

The Willow Warbler - good luck with that! (photos from Google Images - www.birdguides.com)

Secondly, the book is peppered with fascinating little tidbits of birding trivia.  Did you know that the British wren’s song (our Winter Wren) contains 103 notes in an 8 second song?  Or that Mozart had a pet starling that whistled his piano concertos and for whom he held a funeral when it died?  Or that birds may pick up and share song snippets from tropical species during migration?  The many connections Barnes makes to science, history, art and music make bird song more relevant for the reader.

And the final reason to bother with this geographically displaced book is that it is infused with the joy of being out among birds, and who doesn’t need a little more of that in their lives.  I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in birdsong, the birds of Britain, or who is looking for a short simple read to fill a cold winter’s evening.

“Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed” by Simon Barnes was published by ShortBooks in November 2011 as a 288 page hardcover.  It is available from Amazon for $21 and will be released in paperback in Canada in May.

*For anyone who is (inconceivably?) keeping track, this is the book of the month for January - it's been a busy few weeks!