The easiest way to learn bird language is to be immersed in it. Sharing stories is a great way to enhance your experiences in the field.

In celebration of this, and of the Bird Language DVD and upcoming release of Jon Young’s newest book, What the Robin Knows, we are putting on a story sharing contest!

Enter your best bird language story to win some great prizes,

including a free week-long Bird Language Intensive and free signed books and DVDs by Jon Young.

Visit the contest page to learn all the details.

The Song Sparrow, Melospiza melodia, is a great companion to have at your sit spot.

These active songsters are found in many places across the United States, from back yards to meadows, favoring thickets and hedgerows. The sparrow’s triangular beak points towards a steady diet of seeds (though a variety of insects are eaten during breeding season). The breast is heavily streaked with a dark central spot.

This is a bird that loves to stay close to the ground to feed and nest, and because of this, the song sparrow has a lot to say about ground-level potential dangers. Cats, foxes, and other ground predators all elicit responses from this observant sparrow. The males maintain a regular series of prominent song perches during breeding season, five to ten feet above the ground.

The song is often rendered as “Maids, maids, put on your tea-kettle-ettle-ettle.” Lang Elliot’s MusicOfNature.org site offers a wonderful video portrait of the song sparrow:

Because the song sparrow is so common and accessible, this bird offers a great chance to get to know one species, and one individual, very well.

When learning bird language, it’s helpful to know who the natural predators in your bioregion are.

Who are the songbirds concerned about right now, in this season? Each predator poses a different level of threat, and brings a unique hunting strategy into the mix. Each predator therefore has a unique “alarm signature” response.

What avian predators are active in your area? This great video by Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology looks at the Screech owl, and even has a nice section with chickadee alarms that help the researcher to locate the owl by day in its roost.

One of the keys to learning bird language is to get familiar with the birds of your area.

Get to know the birds not just as a species (“look, a Robin!”), but as individuals (“hey, it’s Sally the Robin,
the one that is nesting in the hemlock tree in the back yard. . .”).

Through this kind of a deepening relationship, you’ll begin to absorb nuances of behavior that will teach you
a lot about that bird’s concerns, habits, and behaviors. Your connection to place will expand with each interaction.

This PBS video, “My Life As a Turkey”, which you can watch online here, is a great example
of building personal familiarity with a species. In the film, naturalist Joe Hutto raises a clutch of turkeys from egg to adulthood, and ends up forming
all kinds of amazing connections: how does a turkey react to a rattlesnake, versus a snake or a hawk? This is the kind of depth of understanding that comes through forming a relationship with the birds and other animals of one’s bioregion. The film is definitely worth watching!

When we practice the art of interpreting bird language, the sounds we hear and the feelings they generate within us can impart a lot of meaning.

A parent robin that is noisily alarming in the presence of a cat that is approaching a grounded fledgling has a much different sound and feeling
than a robin singing in the early morning from a high up perch. The difference is tangible. The art of bird language is in tuning into these qualities of sound, posture, and feeling. This applies not only to birds, but also to mammals and other beings.

PBS currently has a great interactive game on their website – test your skills at interpreting the vocalizations of various dog sounds!
Try it out – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/meaning-dog-barks.html

On March 12, 2011 I hosted a free call about learning deep bird language.

Here is a link to part 1 of the recording on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF9OVJqvakY

Here’s an awesome example of how far you can take the skills of interpreting bird and mammal language. This podcast from the Radiolab blog, called “Wild Talk”, has examples from both the prairie and the jungle of animal communication.

Those familiar with Jim Corbett’s stories of tracking the movements of leopards by the monkey vocalizations will love this podcast. There is also a great section on prairie dog alarms. Listen to the part about the researcher who spent years studying these animals, and the subtlety of his ability to determine which predator is causing the alarms. There are so many other possibilities hinted at in this podcast, too… check it out!

When we connect deeply with ONE type of bird or mammal, it is amazing how much we can learn to understand about the communications of that species.

If you have had a dog or cat for a while, you will probably have noticed how you can “read” (to some degree) the intentions behind certain behaviors and vocalizations. You know when your dog wants to be let outside by the whining tone of voice, excited tail movement, and obvious scratching at the door. Likewise, you can oftentimes know if an unknown person or other animal is in the dog’s territory by the quality of the dog’s barking.

To deepen this skill in reading the voice, listen to the subtleties in voicing as different situations arise. Listen for tone, duration, repetitiveness, and also note what feelings arise in your body when you hear the sounds. Then, transfer these skills over to the birds, and pick ONE bird, like a robin, that you encounter around your home every day, to watch and connect deeply with.

When you go out to your secret spot, which are the bravest birds, and how do you know? Well you know the bravest birds because they’re the ones who either a) don’t fly away from you, or b) they’re the first ones that come back after you’ve sat down next to your tree.

Are all birds equally brave or equally fearful? No. Definitely certain species are very fearful and mistrusting and so they’re going to avoid you all the time. Other species don’t seem to care that you’re there at all. You’ll get to know this over time. Things like chickadees don’t seem to really care at all whether you’re there or not, whereas with birds like the ovenbird, even though you might be hearing it all the time, you almost never see it. What’s going on with that?

Well let’s look at that. Who are the bravest animals? That’s the other question. You go to your secret spot everyday and you’ll start to notice that you see more and more animals. Is it more are moving in, or is it because there’s a level of trust evolving?

When you’re first at your secret spot on that very first day, you might notice that gray squirrels seem to move about whether you’re there or not. They seem to be among the bravest animals. Groundhogs, you see them early on in your secret spot career, seem to be fairly brave, as well. The same is true with rabbits.

If you’ve been out at your secret spot for five minutes, you might notice that there’s nothing around you. After ten minutes you might notice some chickadees or you might notice some birds moving in the treetops. After fifteen minutes you might notice that there’s some birdsong starting around you, but not close by.

It’s not until you’ve been there for twenty full minutes sitting perfectly still that you start to notice the birds right around you singing and feeding again. It takes at least twenty minutes in the beginning, if you’re not practicing the routine of invisibility. It takes at least twenty minutes in the beginning for baseline to return, once you’ve settled into your secret spot.

So even in the beginning, you’re going to have twenty minutes to wait at your secret spot. So you might ask yourself, ‘how long should I stay at my secret spot?’ If you stay any less than twenty minutes you’re not going to learn anything and that’s the bottom line. So you’re bound to stay there for at least a half an hour if you want to see baseline at all. My recommendation is you get used to staying there for 45 minutes to an hour. That’s a regular routine.

You’ll notice that after twenty minutes, the bravest birds appear. After about a half an hour, once those brave birds have settled in and shown enough comfort, you have your medium species, they start to return. At that time you might notice the ground feeding sparrows start to show back up again. Then the last birds that show up are things like towhees that will come close to you while you’re at your secret spot. It might take a full 35 or 40 minutes for the towhees to show up.

So there is absolutely a progression. There are those bravest birds that go out there, and it seems like there are other species who are hiding in the shadows saying, “let’s watch and see what happens to them, and if they live, then we’ll come out.” The same thing happens, they go out and now you have the medium and brave birds out there and then the really shy birds are watching. There is a progression over hours.

Where I’m from there are lots of Carolina Wrens. I’ve always been curious as to why in the middle of winter they would suddenly burst out in song. I always suspected it was an alarm because it was so out of context, and it was loud enough and it carried with it a feeling that felt alarming. It didn’t sound like the normal song, but it was the song phrases, so if you heard it on a bird tape, you wouldn’t know the difference.

I noticed this because they would sing out of context in these sudden bursts that seemed to be associated with other bird alarms. It wasn’t like they were singing territorially; they seemed to be singing for another reason.

One day I had the opportunity to figure out exactly what was going on. I was walking below the dam at Marlou Twitchel Farms, which is now a county park in Monmouth county New Jersey. I was following the stream looking at the tracks of a Muskrat and a Mink, when I heard that alarm going off in a very specific location.

The sound came from the top of a south-facing hill, and in the January winter, it was a little microclimate of warmth. There were always little gnats hovering around even though it seemed to be twenty degrees outside. So, after I heard that alarm sequence go off, I walked up the hillside and found an animal trail, and on that trail, the fresh tracks of a Gray Fox.

So I came back the next day and I was walking by that same place, when again, this time from behind me, I heard the same wren call, and again I went in there and found fresh fox tracks. So I began to realize that the wren was giving its alarm call whenever the Gray Fox sneaked away from me.

I saw this as an opportunity to get close to the gray fox, so the next day I walked down the trail, and spooked the fox out of his usual hiding place. He sneaked through the place where the wrens were hiding, and the wrens gave their alarm, but instead of walking in the direction that I normally did, I doubled back on myself.

I crept over to the place where I knew the fox was headed judging by his patterns from the two days before. I set myself up in a good place where I could see down over the edge of the hill. Sure enough, coming from the place where the wrens had just alarmed, looking over his shoulder and moving in a sneaky posture, was the Gray Fox, and he was using the tree roots as his cover.

That’s how I learned that songs out of context can sometimes be alarms. Don’t always think that alarms are limited only to call notes.

When you go on a walk you may see a Song Sparrow sitting in a bush, and then a little further up the trail, you’ll see another one in a field of tall grass on your right, and still another in the blackberries on your left. You might think all these birds are pretty much the same, but they may not be the same. One of those Song Sparrows may be seven years old, and if there’s a Song Sparrow in your neighborhood that’s lived through seven seasons, it has an immense amount of wisdom. That would be a bird to watch.

I spent seven years going to the same Secret Spot, and over time I became familiar with certain individual birds that I saw year after year. I began to recognize that some of those birds knew things that no other bird in the forest knew. So birds are very different from individual to individual, in terms of awareness of the world. You especially see this emphasized among the begging juvenile sparrows, which are killed frequently, versus the sparrow of seven seasons who is the first to notice the hawk or the weasel.