Birds as Teachers
Looking back on last week I realize how far we’ve come, how much we’ve learned already. Sure, we all had varying levels of knowledge going into this program, but our activities this week really made clear that we all have learned so much. Our “bird sit” this week was perhaps the clearest example of this. After our first bird sit in the fall, we came together in an attempt to describe and map what we’d heard. There were only a few species mentioned by name at that time, and a whole lot of mediocre descriptions of the bird songs and calls we didn’t recognize. “I think I remember was some sort of high pitched fast little song”…
This past Wednesday, a cool clear Spring morning bursting with birdsong, we returned from our bird sit with long lists of not only a variety of different named species, but knowledge of the types of calls vs. songs and general feeling of the forest. “I heard a Winter Wren singing from the Salmonberry shrub in front of me while the whole forest seemed to be calm and at baseline. Fifteen minutes later, the same Wren gave some urgent alarm calls but no surrounding birds seemed to have been alarmed, indicating that there probably was not a general threat like a predator in the area.”
We are by no means experts in bird language at this point; true experts spend years listening and observing. We do, however, have a strong foundation of core routines to help get us there, if we so choose.