Learn 3 Bird Calls in 10 minutes!

By Elisabeth Payne, COMS

photo source: James Hawkins, via PDP (CC0)

The city is so much quieter now that we are all staying home. I can hear lots of birds singing to welcome spring. I have always enjoyed wildlife and I got my first pair of binoculars and a field guide for my twelfth birthday. I only know a few bird calls, but I would love to learn more. The Cornell Lab Bird Academy has all kinds of lessons for learning bird calls. There is a fee for the entire course, but there is a free sample lesson that is amazing. You will learn to identify the call of a robin, a chipping sparrow, and a mountain chickadee in this lesson. YouTube has lots of bird call videos, but they tend to have on screen text that isn't accessible to identify the bird making the sound. The best way to use YouTube to learn bird calls is to know the name of the bird whose call you would like to learn and then search just for that bird call. For example here is a YouTube video of an oriole call.  Note: If VoiceOver won't play the video try rotating your device between portrait and landscape view.

I know for sure we have robins here in DC right now! The next time you are outside listen closely and see if you can hear one.  How do you learn new bird calls? Let us know in the comments if there any other websites or apps we should check out.