Birding With Hearing Loss and my Blue Grosbeak

Hearing deficiency is a pernicious impediment to someone who wants to be a productive birder. As most any birder will tell you, it is often the bird's song that is the first clue to finding and identifying a species, as most birds have good reasons to remain hidden in forest foliage and other habitats. Bird songs are also one of the most beautiful aspects to appreciating the environment that one is living in. 

I've apparently lived all my life with a certain amount of hearing loss, especially at higher frequencies. I realized in my twenties that I could hear crickets in one ear but not the other. I suspect that hearing loss had other effects on my learning abilities, as I could not process words and language quickly and would quickly lose the thread of conversations and lectures if they were not accompanied by visual cues like subtitles (or more recently PowerPoint slides). I was hopeless at learning foreign languages, and I suspect the hearing disability was partly at fault (laziness may have been the other).

But birdwatching captured me. It started for geological reasons actually, when I was exploring the Hawaiian Islands. There are the volcanoes of course, but the stories of the native birds of Hawaii and their unique evolution caught my attention in a big way, and I started looking for the native birds with greater and greater interest. As a consequence, I began paying more attention to my unexpectedly diverse local species, and with the purchase of a camera with a high zoom, I was hooked.

It was frustrating at times. If I was birding with others, they would perhaps stop and say "there's a Downy Woodpecker singing", and I was clueless. I could hear many common birds, but hearing and identifying the rarer and more unusual birds was to me as incomprehensible as trying to listen to a conversation in Spanish or German.

Two things happened. The first was that after living for decades with undiagnosed hearing loss, I was tested and then fitted with some sophisticated hearing aids. As any audiologist will tell you, they don't entirely solve the problem of hearing loss, but they can help. Not by being louder, but by filtering out some extraneous noise so one can follow speech in noisy environments. It turns out that works well when trying to discern bird calls from the ambient sounds of the forest. My aural experience in natural settings was transformed.

The second was Cornell University's Merlin Sound ID app. I've been recording and reporting my bird observations on eBird for several years now, but didn't do much with the bird sound identifier. When I started hearing more bird species I came to realize that the sound app could be a great complement to a person with hearing loss. I cannot count the times that I left the bird app running while I walked a trail, and noticed that some interesting bird species were being recorded. I knew to start looking for them, even though I had not heard them for myself. I've been able to find and report new bird species as a result.

In June, I was using the Merlin app while listening for forest birds deep within Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northernmost California. The app was listing the expected birds like robins and other thrushes, but then it started listing a Marbled Murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) repeatedly. It made no sense to me, since my limited knowledge placed murrelets as shorebirds and we were miles inland. I was curious enough to look it up to find that the bird spends the day fishing along the coast, but then flies inland, sometimes many miles, to their nests in old-growth coastal forests. Their nests were not discovered by ornithologists until 1974!

That brings us to our bird of the day, the Blue Grosbeak (Passerina caerulea). The Merlin app is of course not perfect, and may produce inaccurate results (I got a Northern Cardinal on the list the other day even though one has never been seen in the area). I have a personal rule that if the app gives me three repeated identifications of the same bird, I will start looking for it in earnest. And that is how I found the Blue Grosbeak on the Tuolumne River Parkway. It's only my third sighting this year of the species, and only the second on the Tuolumne, so it was a real thrill to capture its beauty on camera.

If there is a moral to this, it may be that if you have hearing loss, it can make a big difference in your life to have it checked. You may be missing far more than you realize.
 

Summer Tanagers in Central California!

This one almost got past me. I pay close attention to new and unusual birds showing up in Stanislaus County, but I've missed some dramas in the adjoining counties. It turns out there has been a sighting of great interest on the county line between Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties along the Stanislaus River at Oak Grove Park in the city of Ripon. It was a discovery of a pair of Summer Tanagers (Piranga rubra) most likely nesting!

A look at the range map for Summer Tanagers shows why this is a pivotal discovery. The orange shows their breeding territory that includes much of the southeastern part of the United States, but very little in California (although rare vagrant sightings have happened as far north as the Canada border in Washington). There have apparently been only two individuals ever sighted in Stanislaus County

That this is a breeding pair is doubly extraordinary. I can't help but hope that they are successful, as these are beautiful birds that would brighten the local ecosystem.

In any case, I was ignorant of the whole affair until local bird expert Jim Gain mentioned the pair on his Facebook page. I don't often follow the influx of birders to see a rare species outside the county, but I've always wanted to see a Summer Tanager, and there was never a nearby opportunity. So this morning, before the sun started blazing, I headed out to Oak Grove Park in Ripon, just over the county line. 

The park itself was a revelation. Stuck between the town's water treatment plant, and a dog food factory, it doesn't seem to have much promise, but as soon as I parked and started walking, I realized the park was a treasure. It is a mature oak forest adjacent to the Stanislaus River, and is managed as a wilderness, with no facilities of any kind. It was quiet and peaceful, and filled with bird songs. I saw Acorn and Nuttall's woodpeckers, Northern Flickers, White-breasted Nuthatches, Oak Titmouse, Bushtits, Ash-throated Flycatchers, Black Phoebes, and many others. But after wandering for more than an hour, no tanagers. I checked the coordinates some birders had provided, and stood and watched and listened. Another birder showed up, and he confirmed that I was in the right place

I was about to leave, when a bird flew right over my head and disappeared into the canopy. I thought it was yellow (like the female tanager), but I wasn't sure, but then I noticed that the Merlin app on my phone was now recording a Summer Tanager call. I began looking more carefully, and before long I spotted the male in the tree above. It stayed long enough for a few pictures and a video (below). I was thrilled beyond measure (as was the other birder).

Not that anyone is counting such things (I however do), but this was my 300th life bird.