On Saturday, I came out of my local grocery store and was starting the walk home when I heard a call overhead. I am personally acquainted with people who could stand under a tree in spring and name all of the migratory warblers overhead, while I’d be going, “hey! guys! I think I hear a robin!”īut this level of knowledge is incredibly satisfying. This level of knowledge isn’t very impressive. And, after many repetitions, I finally learned that if something is singing a loud, fast three-note song in D.C. I learned that blue jays make a vast array of different sounds. I learned that red-eyed vireos are everywhere. I could ask my phone what I was hearing and get an immediate answer. Suddenly, my bird-song-learning accelerated. That’s the first time I tried out the app Merlin, which can identify birds by song – and right away, it told me that the weird gull-like sound I’d been hearing from the tree tops was, fittingly, a merlin.

The learning really picked up in the summer of 2021, on a visit to northern Michigan. I learned the Eastern wood-pewee and the white-throated sparrow. And how had I lived most of my life in cardinal territory without knowing what they sound like? I don’t know, but I did it. But that weird spring and summer of 2020, I figured out some more. I had mourning dove down, and wood thrush, and mockingbird. With less sound from cars, the trees nearby were revealed to be filled with bird song, and I started wondering what I was hearing. It started in the earliest days of the pandemic, when the only thing I could do to get away from my home/office every day was to take walks around my neighborhood.

And one of them is way more awareness of bird songs. But for me, a lot of good things have come from this time, too.

I don’t love the concept of pandemic silver linings, because the pandemic has been so awful in so many ways. The almost three years since October 2019 have been pretty weird. Here’s the short version: A fish crow sounds like a crow, but instead of saying “caw!” it says “uh-uh.” I heard a crow say “uh-uh.” Eureka! Fish crow! In October 2019 I wrote about the moment when I realized that I can tell the difference between a fish crow and an American crow.

Everywhere synonym