Birding While Blind
Joeita Gupta: I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse.
Joeita Gupta: Bird watching or birding is a great way to reflect on your life or just to zone out for a while. It's a chance to get out in nature and take a break from the stress of work and your daily routine. It has a range of therapeutic benefits. Bird watching has been shown to reduce anxiety, stress, and even depression. It's also just a cool hobby. It's something that can be done individually if you like some peace and quiet, or it can be done as part of a group. And of course, the term bird watching, it turns out, is a little deceptive. After all, many people with disabilities, including blindness, are avid birders. Today we discuss birding by ear. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Joeita Gupta: Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm joining you from the Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. My hair is pulled back in a bun and I am wearing an orange t-shirt or shirt with a round neck and short sleeves.
Joeita Gupta: In today's episode, we are talking about birding or birding by ear more specifically. Quite a number of years ago when I was still a child, my parents bought me a pair of binoculars hoping that I would be able to participate in bird-watching with everybody else. Of course, as someone who was visually impaired, I had limited success, but it made me realize that you could just as well listen to birdsong and be a part of something really interesting, a chance to do something recreational or to get out in nature.
Joeita Gupta: So for quite a number of years now, I've had a keen interest in birdwatching or birding. And my guest today is similarly interested in birding. Jerry Berrier is a retired access technology instructor and an avid birder by ear going all the way back to his university days.
Joeita Gupta: Jerry, hello and welcome to The Pulse. It's really nice to have you on the program.
Jerry Berrier: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Joeita Gupta: Well, Jerry, we've all heard about bird watching. What exactly is birding by ear?
Jerry Berrier: Well, number one, they don't talk about bird watching these days near as much as they did a long time ago. It's now called birding, B-I-R-D-I-N-G. And birding by ear is trying to learn to identify birds by the sounds they make. And on its surface that sounds fairly simple, but a lot of birds make a lot of different sounds and they make different sounds at different times of the year and in different localities. So there's a lot to it. But birding by ear is what I do because I'm totally blind, so I can't really see the birds. Ideally, I love to go birding with someone who is sighted who can say, "Oh yeah, that really is a Baltimore Oriole that you thought you heard." So that's what birding by ear is.
Joeita Gupta: So is this something that only people who are blind or have low vision happen to be interested in or is birding by ear something that everyone and anyone can take up regardless of ability?
Jerry Berrier: Birding by ear is practiced by a lot of really top-notch birders. And here's the reason why. When you're looking for a bird, you're looking up into the canopy where there are lots of leaves on the tree in the summer, and even if you can see the bird or think you know where it is, your field of vision is restricted, whereas the field of hearing is 360 degrees. That's number one.
Jerry Berrier: Secondly, you can hear a bird a lot further away than you can see it, usually. I should have said farther away. You can hear a bird at a pretty good distance if it's not too noisy in the area and you can hear a bird under many circumstances. It can be foggy or very cloudy or anything. It could be a snowstorm and you can still hear a bird, even though you may not be able to see it. The ideal way to bird is to be able to see it and hear it both. You hear it and you think, ooh, I think that's a scarlet tanager. And then you look up and say, "Yep, that's really what it is." But in my case, I hear it and then I say it's a scarlet tanager. So in my mind it is.
Joeita Gupta: Now you did say this can get pretty complicated. How many species of birds would you say you are familiar with just based on their birdsong?
Jerry Berrier: Well, number one, I have to relearn some of them every year because some of the warblers are only around at a certain part of the summer or spring, so I don't get a chance to hear them that often. I would say ones that I can identify readily, I've never actually counted them, but probably 50 or 60 maybe.
Joeita Gupta: That's amazing. How did you get started with birding by ear?
Jerry Berrier: By sheer accident in a way. It was a college professor in a biology class that wasn't sure what to do with me during the lab portion. So he let me borrow his, they were actually record albums at the time. This was back in the seventies. He let me borrow his Cornell University Bird Sounds Records, and he said, "Your lab grade is going to be based on a walk in the woods with me at the end of the semester, and I want to see how many of these birds you can identify."
Jerry Berrier: And when I first started I thought, oh my gosh, I don't know, robin, cardinal, sparrow, they all sound the same to me. How will I ever learn them or even care to remember them? But by the end of the semester, I was absolutely hooked.
Jerry Berrier: And that was the time when cassette recorders had just kind of become readily available. And I got one and I started going around everywhere I would go, especially if I was on vacation or in an unusual area, I would take that thing with me. It was a fairly good-sized cassette recorder that ran on C batteries and had a little microphone actually attached to the top of it. And I would hold it up over my head and record the bird and then listen to it and try and compare it with one of the recordings that I had from my professor's records.
Jerry Berrier: But anyway, needless to say, that got me started and I haven't stopped since then.
Joeita Gupta: Now you see, this is how you open up a can of worms because the moment you mentioned that your lab grade was dependent on your skills as a birder by ear, I have to ask you, how did you do on your lab? Did you pass?
Jerry Berrier: I did. I got an A.
Joeita Gupta: That's amazing.
Jerry Berrier: Yeah, I had learned probably maybe 10 birds at that point. And those were ones that we happened to hear out in the woods that day. And the professor, I said, I did great.
Joeita Gupta: I'm so glad to hear it. And so that's really what sparked off this hobby, birding by ear, and you've carried it on for a number of years. I'm just curious, and I ask this because I live in an urban center, I live in downtown Toronto. With so much noise, it's hard to hear any birds. Has that been your experience as well that there are fewer species of birds to listen to when you live in a city or an urban area? Or is it that the birds are present but we're just not listening for them? So what's actually going on there?
Jerry Berrier: Well, it's a little bit of both. There are birds present. If you're really in an urban area, you might have pigeons, you might have morning doves, you almost definitely will have house sparrows, which make the single sound over and over again. They get, "Cheep, cheep, cheep." And that's pretty much all they say.
Jerry Berrier: But there are birds that are even in the most urban areas. However, it's certainly easier to find birds that are interesting to listen to if you go either to a less urban area or to a park or somewhere where there's a little pond and maybe a few trees because those are things that birds need. They need trees, they need places where they can perch and hide, and they need a water source. And if you have those two things, there's a good likelihood there are going to be some birds around. I live in a relatively urban area and I get chickadees and song sparrows, house sparrows, house finches, lots of different birds around here, robins, cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, and I hear all those birds and I hear them mostly because I have microphones mounted on the outside of my house and I have them cabled into where my computer is, and I can turn those microphones on early in the morning and I do just about every day. And yeah, I hear the traffic and all kinds of wind noise and thunder and everything, but I do hear a lot of birds also.
Joeita Gupta: Well, certainly we've come a long way from the days of the cassette player. How exactly would you say technology has made it easier for you to bird by ear?
Jerry Berrier: I'm glad you asked because it has made a huge difference. I learned probably more birds from a series of CDs called Birding by Ear and More Birding by Ear than through any other source. And that was the best I had. And for a long time, I used to think, I'd give anything if I had an app that would test me, it would play a sound and say, "Do you know what that is?" And if I said yes, then I would have to confirm that I really heard what I thought I did. There was no such app available for a long time, but now there is. There is an iPhone app called Larkwire. It's a one-word, L-A-R-K-W-I-R-E. It is very voiceover friendly, very accessible, and it does exactly that. I can set it for land birds in the Northeastern United States and it will start testing me.
Jerry Berrier: It'll play a sound, and then I have the option of either hitting, I'm not sure, or yes, I know this bird. And if I hit yes, it'll name it. And then I'm on my honour to say wrong if I actually got it wrong. And if I did get it wrong, it will then add it to a random list of birds that it continues to play, and it'll keep that bird on the list until I get it right several times over a short period of time. And then it'll say, "Oh, you've passed the sparrows list and we won't use those anymore." So for anyone who really wants to hone their skills in birding, Larkwire is the way to go.
Jerry Berrier: And I'll just say one more thing about technology. Well, I could go on and on about it actually. The web provides many resources. Cornell University has a site you can go to, which is, I believe it's allaboutbirds.org. And if that doesn't find it, just try Cornell Birds. And there's a website there that you can put in the name of a bird, and it will not only let you hear the sounds, but it'll tell you all about the bird, what other birds it's related to, its size compared to other birds and lots of other things. So the web has been wonderful.
Jerry Berrier: Actually, my interest in birding is what spawned my interest in learning to write HTML, because a long time ago when things were simpler and there weren't all kinds of graphics and everything, I created a website called birdblind.org. And I still have it, although I have to be honest and say I haven't kept it up there very well in the past probably 10 or 15 years. But really, technology has opened up the world of birding as it has so many other things for me over the years.
Joeita Gupta: Did your interest in birding, by any chance lead to other interests? I'm just curious about whether you got thinking about birds and their migratory patterns, their habitat, or maybe you got into issues of conservation. Did your interest in birding at all open up these other associated interests for you?
Jerry Berrier: Yes. I was just listening to a Living on Earth podcast this morning that was talking about plastics and what a terrible pollutant they've become over the years, problems they've caused. I listen to things like that all the time. I also listen to a podcast called Bird Note, which is a daily three-minute podcast, which plays a bird and then says some things about it. I know what time sunrise and sunset are most every day, even though I'm totally blind, because I care about that because that has an impact on what time I should be listening for the birds. I am interested in climate change and concerned about it much more than I would've been had I not gotten involved in this.
Jerry Berrier: So yes, my hobby of birding has really changed my life. And I'll go out on a limb and take credit for saying that it has also spawned interest in nature in both of my children who are in their forties now, and my grandchildren and other people in my family.
Jerry Berrier: My twin brother who is sighted is always telling me about birds that he sees, and he's got crows that come to his yard and sometimes leave gifts for him, he says, and they do. They are known to do that. If you feed them a lot, they start to like you and recognize you. And sometimes if they see something shiny, they'll grab it and drop it in your yard. So yeah, it's been life-changing for me.
Jerry Berrier: Am I an expert on bird anatomy and things like that? No. If somebody tells me the colours of a bird, I tend to forget them within 10 seconds because I just don't have a good frame of reference for that. But I do know that the red-bellied woodpecker doesn't have a red belly, a little patch of red on it. And I know that Baltimore Orioles maybe don't even exist in Baltimore all that much. That's a name that they got. And a lot of times birds are named after where somebody saw one time. That doesn't mean that it's primary habitat. And a lot of birds are named after people too. So yeah, it has absolutely been life-changing for me.
Joeita Gupta: Now, you did say this was a hobby, but I'm sure Jerry, you're not the only one to have this particular hobby. What sort of a community would you say exists out there for blind birders such as yourself?
Jerry Berrier: The only one I know of is for people with disabilities in general, and it's called Bird Ability. Their website is birdability.org. And it was started by a woman who is a wheelchair user and an avid birder. And she goes alone most of the time. And she decided she wanted to have a way of knowing where there were accessible birding sites around the country. And she also wanted to encourage other people with disabilities to become birders. So she started this birdability.org and they now have a map that it's visual. But you can look at it and if you're in a specific area, you can pick that area and see what other people have said are some of the more accessible birding sites. And it's got other information too, about how to best assist a blind birder and things like that.
Jerry Berrier: But in all honesty, finding other people to go birding with has been one of the most difficult challenges for me. I do sometimes go with other people, and I've kind of gotten to be known around the area because I've been on radio shows. And anytime I'm offered the opportunity to talk about birding, I do it. And I've done birding-by-ear workshops for not only the Mass Audubon Society, but for the L.L. Bean. It's a huge outdoor store in Freeport, Maine. And before the pandemic, they invited me up there several years in a row during their weekly spring celebration to do a birding-by-ear workshop, and I really enjoy doing it. So things like that have gotten me known a little bit. I also have done birding-by-ear workshops for the local training agencies for blind adults and blind children. And I do a lot of things like that.
Jerry Berrier: But yes, it's difficult to find people who are interested in birding and who are not afraid to say, "Oh, sure, you can come along with me."
Jerry Berrier: Those who I have gone birding with, I think have enjoyed it because I'm friendly and I am enthusiastic about it. I was actually at a birding event last weekend where the birding event was designed specifically to attract people who are blind, because there's a lot of movement these days among agencies that serve birders, to try and include people with disabilities, just as there is to promote racial diversity and other things that didn't necessarily exist so much even a few years ago. So that was a fun time. But there were only five blind people showed up, including me. But we had a good time, and I hope to do things like that more in the future.
Joeita Gupta: So do you think the bulk of the difficulty just comes down to the fact that sighted people are hesitant to accompany someone who's blind? Is that what it comes down to, do you think?
Jerry Berrier: I think that's a big part of it. Getting transportation to the great birding places is also a challenge. Some of the work I do with the Massachusetts Audubon Society involves helping to design accessible nature trails. Some of them have rope guides and braille signage on them and things like that, but almost all of them are really difficult to get to by public transportation. So you have to be able to get there, and you have to be willing to find somebody who is brave enough to accompany you.
Jerry Berrier: And as you I'm sure know, when someone does accompany us, they tend to realize immediately, oh, this is not so bad after all. It's not difficult to guide a blind person. But some people are very focused on logging as many different species as they can, and they don't want to be bothered with anything that's going to hold them back from moving around quickly and getting it done. But not all birders are that way though.
Joeita Gupta: A few minutes ago you talked about accessible spots for birding. I just wanted to ask you a bit more about that. Now, I'm sure there's a range of things that would make a spot accessible to birders with disabilities, given that there's a lot of different disabilities. But just in terms of broad overarching characteristics, what would you say makes a birding spot accessible to people with disabilities?
Jerry Berrier: Well, a lot of the accessibility has to do with physical things. Is the surface reasonably level? Is it navigable by a wheelchair or a walker or a stroller or that sort of thing? Is the trail laid out so that it's very easy to establish the route and not go off on the wrong direction? Do they keep the vegetation cut back along the sides of the trail so that if your apparatus is a little wider than a person, that you still are not going to get into the poison ivy and all of that? So things like that go a long way to make a trail accessible.
Jerry Berrier: Not only do they have to set up the accessibility, but they have to be maintained. We had a trail that I was involved in not too far from where I live, and it was wonderful. I mean, it had braille signage and a rope guide and all. But I went there once and nobody had cut it back for a year, and the thing was so overgrown that I couldn't even use it. So there is a bit of maintenance involved.
Joeita Gupta: Yeah, no, for sure. That's definitely something you have to keep up if you want to make sure that an accessible spot for birding or anything else really just remains an accessible spot.
Joeita Gupta: You mentioned your website as well in our conversation, and I wanted to go back to the website. I know you said you hadn't really maintained it for a while, but one of the really cool things about your website is the many recordings of birdsong that can be found there. How many species of birds have you recorded on your website? And one of the things that I couldn't help noticed when I looked at your website is that there are a number of recordings of birdsong from different parts of the world. Does that mean that you went out and got all of that, all of those recordings yourself, or did you have friends and other people make contributions to your website so you could have birdsong from as far away as Sweden and India?
Jerry Berrier: I did most of the recording that was done in the United States. I also went to Sweden once on vacation and recorded some birds there. But the one from India was recorded by a wonderful guy who, I wouldn't say that I'm a close friend of his, but he knew about my interest in birds, and he took his Victor Stream with him to India when he went for a visit to his family and recorded a bunch of birds. And there was another blind person in, I believe it was Singapore that sent me a lot of birds sounds. So a lot of that comes from other people.
Jerry Berrier: And then my twin brother who's into photography, he took pictures of a lot of the birds that I recorded, not at the same time, but he would find one of the same species, and so I was able to match pictures with a lot of the recordings on there.
Joeita Gupta: Great. Well listen, Jerry, it wouldn't be a complete interview on birding by ear if we didn't actually listen to some birdsong. So why don't you play a couple of clips for us. Maybe you can tell us what we're listening to and we can hear a bit of birdsong on the program.
Jerry Berrier: I think I'll try the Baltimore Oriole first. You're going to hear a voice on there, the person's name is Lang Elliot, and I always try to give attribution to him because I use a lot of his recordings and he's aware of it and has given me permission to do so. But he's one of the foremost nature recordists in the world. So you'll hear him announce the bird and then you'll hear the bird.
Lang Elliot: Baltimore Oriole.
Jerry Berrier: So you can see that that bird makes a lot of different sounds. I hope it came through.
Joeita Gupta: Yeah, yeah, no, that was really amazing. At first, I was going to say it sounds a bit like a sparrow, but then it just goes ahead and makes all of these different sounds out of nowhere. It was really quite something.
Joeita Gupta: Hey, listen, I have another question. So it sounds like that bird is really clear. How is that possible if a bird is out in the wild? You should be able to hear background noise, wind, leaves, other birds even. What goes into making one of these recordings? Do you just, I don't know, isolate a single bird and isolate their birdsong so it can be heard above and over all the other noise in the environment?
Jerry Berrier: That's what the professionals do. My recordings always have a lot of noise in them because I don't have the thousands of dollars of equipment and my editing, my post-production software is rather primitive compared to what they use. But really they try to get the microphone as close to where they think the bird's going to be. And I'm sure it involves climbing trees sometimes and setting up poles and things with microphones on them. But it is amazing. Most of Lang's recordings, you don't really hear much of anything in the background.
Joeita Gupta: Oh, well, I think it's pretty incredible. My post-production skills are pretty limited. I honestly wouldn't know where I'd be without Marc Aflalo. So apart from that, what else can you play for us today?
Jerry Berrier: Do you have a request?
Joeita Gupta: Well, you did mention the crow a couple of times during our conversation, so why don't we go ahead and see if you can find that one.
Jerry Berrier: Okay, here's the American crow. There's another one called a fish crow, which has a very different sound, but here's the American crow.
Lang Elliot: American crow.
Jerry Berrier: I won't play the entire thing, but I can tell you that crows make a lot of different sounds. Those are just the more.
Joeita Gupta: That one sounded a bit angry to be honest with you.
Jerry Berrier: So let me just play real quickly the fish crow, which from what I've been told, looks pretty much the same as the American crow. But my wife used to call it the uh-huh bird because she said it always sounded like it was saying uh-huh. So here's the fish crow,
Lang Elliot: Fish crow.
Jerry Berrier: So there you go.
Joeita Gupta: Yeah, there you go. Oh yeah, yeah, no, it definitely sounds that way. Hey, listen, in Toronto, we have a sports team called the Toronto Blue Jays. By any chance, do you have a recording of the Blue Jays?
Jerry Berrier: I certainly do. And the blue jay is a mimic. It can even mimic a red-tailed hawk and it makes a lot a sounds, yeah. But here's some of its more common ones.
Lang Elliot: Blue jay.
Jerry Berrier: So there are just some of the sounds that they make.
Joeita Gupta: That's amazing. And you're saying that's all from one bird?
Jerry Berrier: Yes.
Joeita Gupta: Well, that is really incredible. Hey, listen, Jerry, what would you say might be one of the rarer birds in your collection that we might have a chance to listen to?
Jerry Berrier: I don't think I have anything that's so rare. I can play one that I consider one of the most beautiful birds. And by the way, they always sound better out in the wild than they do on a recording. Even the Baltimore Oriole, when I hear one outside, it's more striking to me because it just has a certain tone to it that just can't be duplicated even in the greatest of recordings. But I'm going to try to play the wood thrush. Let's see, wood thrush. And the wood thrush has sort of a flute-like sound. They're heard more in deeper woods, and they're often heard late in the evening around twilight. So here it goes.
Lang Elliot: Wood thrush.
Jerry Berrier: And they do that over and over again.
Joeita Gupta: Yeah, that's a very distinctive call. And I think I've heard that one before actually, but I hadn't identified it as a wood thrush. No, that is really amazing.
Joeita Gupta: Just as we wrap up here, Jerry, what advice would you give to a potential prospective birder, someone who's blind, who's thinking they might want to get into birding by ear? How should they get started?
Jerry Berrier: I would recommend that they get their hands on the Birding by Ear CDs and More Birding by Ear. I know they're still in production. I'm sure Amazon sells them. There are lots of ways to get them. Because there are very involved explanations of what the birds are like. And so I think that's a good way to get started.
Jerry Berrier: Another way is to find somebody, most places have birding clubs and you can contact the club and see if they can find somebody who's willing to go with you and just do some birding. And I think the more you do it, if you have any interest at all, your interest will be peaked and then you'll begin to find other related things. And it can be life-changing for other people as it has been for me.
Joeita Gupta: Jerry, it's been so nice talking to you about this. It was a blast having you play some of the birdsong for us, and just hearing about your journey and your decades of passion for birding by ear. Thanks so much for being on the program.
Jerry Berrier: You're very welcome. And you're a good interviewer, and I thank you for having me.
Joeita Gupta: That was Jerry Berrier, who is an avid birder by ear and a retired access technology instructor. If you found this interesting and want to get into birding by ear, I hope you'll pick up some of those CDs that Jerry talked about over the course of our interview. And of course, we would love if you could drop us a line to let us know how you feel about the program. You can find us on Twitter at AMI-audio, use the hashtag pulseami. Or you can find us by email, feedback@ami.ca. Give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545. And if you leave a voicemail, please don't forget to leave permission to play the audio on the program.
Joeita Gupta: Well, folks, I got to spread a couple of wings and fly out of the studio, but it's been great talking to you about birding by ear and thanks for indulging me because this has been something of an interest of mine and I hope to come back with more programming for you in the very near future.
Joeita Gupta: The videographer today has been Matthew McGurk, technical producer is Marc Aflalo, who is amazing. Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for AMI Podcasts, and Andy Frank is the manager for AMI-audio. I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening and happy birding.