Every journey begins with a single step, or so they say. Some journeys, however, also require a little shove, a push in the right direction. And so it was for us learning, I mean really studying to the nth degree, birdsong.

The shove I got was when I picked up a book that had been highly touted in the birding community. It also came highly recommended by a birdsong recordist friend of mine, Geoff Keller. He has more than 3,000 recordings archived with the Macauley Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The book, The Singing Life of Birds, by Donald Kroodsma, opened my eyes (not to mention my ears) to the world of birdsong.

I read the book cover-to-cover. Then read it again … and again. It seemed I couldn’t get enough of it.

Just a few months later, I was fortunate to be able to meet Dr. Kroodsma (through Geoff Keller, of course). The conversation went something like this:

Me: Dr. Kroodsma, it’s so good to meet you.

Him: Call me Don. It’s good to meet you, too.

Me: Unfortunately, I have a bit of a bone to pick with you.

Don: Uh-oh. What did I do this time?

Me: Ann and I have this tiny little trail out back of our house that goes down through the woods behind our house. I can easily make the entire loop in 10 minutes, no problem. Then I read your book. Now, that little 10-minute walk?

Don: Yes?

Me: Two-and-a-half hours … minimum. I have to stop and listen to every bird, every song, every note of every song, every flutter of wings, every little call note. All because of your book.

Don just laughed and said, “I’m glad I could help.”

And so it began. I basically quit hearing the various songs of birds on our property and really began listening to them, studying them, making notes of every little nuance, every little variation in a particular bird’s song.

It got to the point that could walk out of my house, close my eyes, listen to a song and tell you not only which species made the vocalization, but which particular bird was singing. It didn’t matter that we had three territories of house wrens around our house; I could separate them individually just by the nuances of their song.

In no time, that experience moved beyond our yard and into the forests behind our house and the fields across the road from our house.

Then it moved even beyond there to the many state and federal lands, private nature preserves, and just about anywhere else I happened to be at any given time.

In short, I was addicted.

Now, some dozen or so years later, I’m still addicted. There is no 12-step program to break me from the disease. And I’m mighty thankful for that. It’s opened up the world of birding, which I’ve been a part of for a lot more than a dozen years, to more and more experiences, experiences that I have virtually every day, no matter where I happen to be.

The last 15 years or so, I’ve been teaching bird identification through sight and especially song, to graduate and undergraduate students who were hired to conduct avian surveys on state and federal lands in south-central Indiana.

After retiring about a year ago, I didn’t want to let go of that part of my life.

The result? Birdsong 101.

There is no one right way to learn birdsong. There is no one method that enables anyone to learn what can be, at times, a seemingly overwhelming task. That’s why we use several methods.

In the last five years of that stretch of teaching birdsong, I used the exact same methods that you’ll find in all of the Birdsong 101 courses:

• Birdsong recordings (although longer ones than you might be used to)
• Birdsong recordings from multiple individual birds
• Mnemonics (including ones that don’t work!)
• Song descriptions from the “experts”
• Spectrograms on your computer (enabling you to study any bird’s song to the nth degree anytime, anywhere)
• Video spectrograms for every song and call in every one of our courses
• Repetitive listening
• Variations in a bird’s song
• Song analyses

By combining all of these methods, including ones that we’ve found usually don’t work, we are sure that virtually anyone can learn birdsong.

You have already taken the first step to really learning birdsong – this website. I hope you’ll take a lot more of those steps with me. Those steps add up to the journey that all of us, me included, are taking to learning more and more about birdsong.

I hope your journey into this world of birdsong is as pleasurable and gratifying as mine has been.

Let’s get to work.