Our moment to moment understanding of the natural world depends on efficiently reducing massive amounts of information from all parts of our body (brain and not) to a manageable, and smaller, subset of information known as our attention. There are many processes that are involved producing attention, but here we want to discuss one important aspect for birding, templating.

Templating is ultimately setting up proper expectations. For a sight example, if your best friend always wears a hat, your template for seeing someone and understanding it to be them, will involve that hat. If the hat is missing it might take a little longer to identify that person. For a hearing example, if your best friend has a higher pitch voice, but happens to be sick (causing a change in pitch), it can take a little longer to identify that person. The time that it takes for your observation to match your expectation can be crucial in birding. Having expectations about which birds are most common and which birds are around during the time of year makes a difference as well. Templating is a means to efficiently reduce that timing.

When forming your templates, the more time in the field you get with birds, the better. In addition, it is extremely important that you never get a perfect template, but you want to continue to define the bird as accurately as possible. Sometimes that means increasing the detail of the template (exact beak angle, exact duration of a note, etc) and sometimes that means loosening up the detail (account for the variations). To state it another way, sometimes you need to make your template match what the bird is, but other times you need to make sure your template is NOT be what the bird isn’t.

Sound difficult? It can be! Trust that you already do this for humans, so we just need to apply our talents and skills to the birds.

Sight Templating

Overall outline

Colors Motions

Location in habitat

Hearing Templating

Pitches

Syllables

Tempo

Number of notes

Timbre

Sight x Hearing Templating

Bouncing calls

Breathing and calls

Non-mouth sounds and motions

Things that are not birds

Do you need perfect templates? Do you need to practice your templates? No to both answers. However, when timing is crucial (a bird flying away from you or hearing a call only once) the efficiency of your template can be the difference between a confident identification and not enough confidence.

NEED A VISUAL TEMPLATE GUIDE

Outlines, motions, motifs

NEED AN AUDIO TEMPLATE GUIDE

Ranges, syllables, frequencies,

BIRD SOUNDS

Birds make all kinds of sounds. Some of them are on purpose (intentional), while others are not necessarily so (unintentional). We want to give you a very brief run down on each of these functions so that you can have an objective way to organize and label the sounds you hear.

Intentional

Vocalizations from the Syrinx (throat sounds)

When most people think of bird sounds, they usually think of vocalizations, meaning that the bird used a specific sound producing organ (called the syrinx) to generate the noise. This is typically broken down into two types of sounds, the call and the song.

Calls

Calls are typically less complex and of relatively short duration. The primary functions are to announce presence. This presence can be important to determine territory, or keep a flock together.

Songs

Songs are typically more complex and relatively longer in duration. The primary functions are to exhibit some sort of quality in addition to presence. This quality can be to emphasize territory or to attract mates.

Flight sounds

When in flight, the wings can cut through the air in predictable ways. This allows birds to make special sounds. One of the more particular ways is the Dive behavior of Anna’s Hummingbird.

Pecking

If you have a local woodpecker in a neighborhood of houses, you know they can make a very loud noise pecking on the pipes! This isn’t for food, it’s for attention! Other birds do similar things.

Beak Smacking

The shape and construction of the beak is also important in making short bursts of sound as the upper and lower parts smack together. Ravens are good at this!

Unintentional

(ducks). If a bird flaps near branches, the contact will make a sound. Some pigeons are totally ok with this!

Flight through the air (limited in owls)

The movement of the feathers on the body through air can make noise in its own right. It can be faint, but can help you know if birds are nearby when they move about, especially if they are not in your sight.

Landing

If you are near a body of water and a bird comes in, you will hear it. If the bird lands on a tree branch, the ground, or a building, it all sounds different.

Pecking

Sometimes a bird is looking for food on the ground or in a tree. Either way, it makes sound. This helps to know where to look.

Describing sound

With the importance of sound in birding, we need to understand that it is harder to communicate about than visual information because most people have not been taught about the details of sound. For instance, most people hear sounds (vibrations of air molecules) between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second (hz); each frequency can be represented as a tone. We are trained about the different colors (wavelengths of light) in detail, but not as much in the various tones. The masters of communicating about sound are musicians! We will take from their language a bit, but understand that musical notation is often not quite up to the full task of sound representation.

A typical description of sound comes in the form of sheet music. Basics from sheet music are:

• Staff and cleff – Bass, alto, tenor, treble
• What frequencies will be played
• a place for them

• Tempo Pauses Rests
• Duration of notes motifs
• Length of motifs
  • WE USE SECONDS ONLY to work on time, not beats per time.

Key signature is huge, represents the “timbre” but the keys for birds differ from music scales.

Tie and slur, glissando, played uninterrupted.

• Chord, multiple notes at the same time. Birds can do this.

• Hard and soft, emphasis

• Staccato and legato, continues vs distinct separate notes.

• Trills

Birds don’t follow the expectations of sheet music, they are dynamic

and creative. More like Jazz.

However, we will use some aspects of music notation to help us try to enter their world. It is better to have some objective viewpoint we can all work with to hear the birds collectively.

Visual Key

As soon as your eyes detect that you are looking at a bird, a series of questions will pop in your head. The exact questions and the order of them will change as you gain experience. The questions will depend greatly on the habitat and time of year you are birding as well. Some of these questions are:

1. What shape does the bird have? What size is it?
2. What colors are dominant?
3. Is it on the ground, the top of the tree, or in the water? How does it fly?
4. Does it walk, hop, or flutter around? How fast does it move its wings?
5. Does it hover?
6. How big is the beak? How long is the tail?
7. Is the head big or small?
8. Are there striking colors or is it dull?

Here we present one way to visually narrow down which bird you are looking at. Our aim is to help the novice birder, focusing on things to work on,

Visual Key

This is not meant to be a general key for our region, only for GRC, and for adults.

• Flying
• Not Flying
  • On water
    • Floating/swimming/diving
      • Lanky neck, distinctly elongated from the body Distinct white chin strap/cheek patch.
        • Short beak, neck thicker, smaller goose – Cackling Goose – page 1
        • Longer beak, neck thinner, larger goose – Canada Goose – page 2
      • No distinct white chinstrap/cheek patch – Double-crested Cormorant – page 26
    • Neck not distinctly elongated from the body.

• • • Wading
      • Distinctly long neck
        • Greyish blue, larger body – Great Blue Heron – page 27
        • Multicolored, often green and brown, smaller body – Green Heron – page 28
      • Not distinctly long neck
        • Small grey bird, very bouncy – America Dipper – page 73
        • Not small and grey
          • Chest and belly white, often bobbing motions, upright posture.
            • Chest with 1 or 2 black bands – Killdeer – page 22
            • Chest without black bands, spotted in breeding adults – Spotted Sandpiper – page 23.
          • Chest and belly not white, running and walking like a chicken – Virginia Rail – page 21.
  • Not on Water
    • On ground
    • Perched (branch, log, fence, other)
  • Shape then size then color.