Birds are my eyesight

For her, birding is more than a hobby. “Birds are my eyesight,” said Glass, a poet and an English professor at West Valley Community College who has been blind since birth. “When I check into a hotel in Pittsburgh, I might remember the rock dove and the house finch in the parking lot, rather than the architecture.”

Glass, 67, was a child when she first noticed the birds twittering outside her family’s home on the Lake Erie coast of Michigan. “My mother told me they were a swallow called the purple martin,” she said. “I was paying attention to where they were flying, and I could actually start to hear the dimensions of our little cabin, the screen porch, the front yard.”

She has mapped her surroundings by bird song ever since.

Birding got a significant boost with the pandemic: With so many people doing less, they tuned in to the sounds of nature more; and with lockdowns came a reduction in noise pollution, which made the bird calls all the more pronounced.

Sarah Courchesne, a Massachusetts Audubon Society program ornithologist in Newburyport, attributes the increased interest in birding partly to the fact that it’s a way for people of all abilities to tap into nature — whether by eye, by ear or by both.

As the birding community grows larger and more diverse, Courchesne said, birding clubs and conservation organizations are thinking more about accessibility, and this is changing the way they talk about birding and think about it.

For one thing, the terminology is evolving. According to Freya McGregor, a 35-year-old birder and occupational therapist specializing in blindness and low vision, the term “birder” was once reserved for those who were more serious than the hobbyist “bird watcher.” But increasingly, “birder” is becoming a catchall, thanks to a growing awareness that some hobbyists identify birds exclusively by listening.

All Persons Trails

Spaces are evolving too. Nature trails from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to the Colombian Andes are being re-imagined, with features such as wheelchair-accessible terrain and guardrails to guide guests with low vision. The Massachusetts Audubon Society recently introduced a series of All Persons Trails, which are designed for accessibility.

Public programming is also expanding. Birding organizations across the country are introducing a new kind of bird “walk” — one called a “big sit,” where you just stay put. These stationary birding events, made popular by the New Haven Birding Club in the early 1990s, is a type of competitive event, sometimes hosted as a fundraiser, in which teams of birders stay within their own 17-foot-diameter circles for 24 hours and identify as many birds as possible.

In May, Courchesne hosted a big sit alongside Jerry Berrier, a blind birder, on an All Persons Trail near Ipswich, Massachusetts. Berrier, who lives in Malden, Massachusetts, said he wanted his event to be less competitive and more meditative than a traditional bird sit.

Bird models at Susan Glass’s home in Saratoga, Californina. (Source: Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

Although some studies have shown that simply hearing bird song may alleviate anxiety and boost feelings of well-being, Berrier, 70, said the benefits went beyond that for him. “Birding gives me a connection with a world I can’t see,” he said, including when the world outside is waking up in the morning and winding down at dusk.

At the Ipswich bird sit, Berrier pointed people to the resonant song of an ovenbird; the buzzy trills of warblers; and the flutelike notes of a Baltimore oriole, which sometimes sounds like it’s saying, “Here; here; come right here, dear.”

When teaching newcomers how to distinguish birds by ear, Berrier often shares mnemonics. For the eastern towhee, he said, listen for a bird that tweets: “Drink yer teeeeea.” The American robin sounds like it’s singing, “Cheer up, cheerily.” The Northern cardinal might be saying, “Watch here, watch here.” In flight, American goldfinches call, “Potato chip,” while olive-sided flycatchers chirp, “Quick! Three beers!”

Identifying 5,400 Species

Michael Hurben, 56, hopes to document what he can while he can. Because of a degenerative retina disease, his field of view has narrowed over time, from 180 degrees to, he estimates, less than one-tenth of that.

So, Hurben, a retired engineer who lives in Bloomington, Minnesota, has doubled down and is on his way to identifying 5,400 different birds — about half of the world’s bird species. “I just want to be able to say that I’ve identified the majority,” he said.

He and his wife, Claire Strohmeyer, who is also 56 and is a clinical researcher, have visited dozens of international destinations to check rare species off the list. But a narrow scope makes searching for a bird in a tree or spotting it through binoculars especially challenging.

This makes Hurben’s ability to identify birds by ear essential. He has brushed up on his skills online and by birding by ear with other birders, including Berrier, who joined Hurben on a trip to Cape May, New Jersey, last year.

Hurben finds it increasingly difficult to hear certain bird song, such as the very high-pitched calls of the colorful cedar waxwing.

“Before we go on a trip, I will try to really study the calls ahead of time,” he said. Although some calls do require a mnemonic to remember, others are very distinctive.

He cited the screaming piha, a bird he and his wife trekked into the Amazon to identify. Its unique call is a go-to for sound designers when making films set in jungles, he said. (Listen for it in Werner Herzog’s 1972 film, “Aguirre, Wrath of God.”) Likewise, another South American bird, the sharpbill, has a call that sounds “like a falling bomb,” Hurben said. “I hear that song once, and I’ll never forget it the rest of my life.”

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