How do I learn to recognise bird song?

Birdsong is the most useful identification skill there is, because most birds are heard long before they are seen and many are never seen at all. It also has a reputation for being impossible, which comes from people trying to learn it by playing a hundred recordings in a row. Learned five species at a time, in the field, over a couple of springs, it is entirely achievable.

What you'll need

• Binoculars
• A phone with a sound-recording app
• A bird song app or website with good recordings
• A notebook

Step by step

1. Learn a handful at a time, and only from birds you can see.The connection that sticks is between a sound and a bird you watched making it. Sit somewhere with singing birds, find the singer with binoculars, and listen while you watch. Five species properly learned beats fifty half-recognised.
2. Start with the loudest and most common.Robin — a wistful, varied, silvery warble, sung all year including at night under streetlights. Wren — extraordinarily loud for the size, a fast rattling trill. Blackbird — rich, fluty, unhurried phrases with pauses. Great tit — a repeated two-note see-saw, often described as teacher-teacher. Chiffchaff — its own name, chiff chaff chiff chaff, from March. Woodpigeon — a five-note coo with the emphasis in an unmistakeable pattern.
3. Describe each song in your own words.Rhythm, speed, pitch, tone, whether it repeats, whether it rises or falls. Write it down. Your own description — 'like a squeaky bicycle pump' for a great tit, 'a football rattle' for a wren — will bring the sound back far more reliably than any published mnemonic.
4. Separate song from call.Song is the territorial and courtship performance, mostly from males, mostly in spring. Calls are short contact and alarm notes used all year and by both sexes, and they are what you will mostly hear outside the breeding season. Learn the common calls too — a robin's ticking, a blackbird's alarm chatter, a great tit's scolding.
5. Use the season.Late March to early June is the singing season, and the dawn chorus in May is the richest hour of the year. Go out at first light with nothing else to do and just listen. Autumn and winter are much quieter and much easier to pick out individual singers such as the robin.
6. Record what you cannot identify.A phone voice recorder catches enough to work on later. Note the date, place and habitat. Playing your own recording back with a field guide or an app is far more effective than trying to remember it.
7. Use identification apps as a check, not a teacher.Apps such as Merlin identify recorded song surprisingly well and are excellent for confirming a guess. Using one instead of listening stops you learning, and they do make mistakes, particularly in noisy places and with unusual species.
8. Learn the confusion pairs deliberately.Chiffchaff and willow warbler look nearly identical and sound completely different — a repeated two-note chant versus a descending silvery cascade. Blackcap and garden warbler are the classic hard pair. Marsh and willow tit, and the various finches, similarly. Work on one pair at a time.
9. Go somewhere with fewer species to start.A garden or a park has a manageable cast. A rich woodland in May has thirty species singing at once and is overwhelming. Build up.
10. Revise every spring.Song fades over the winter for everyone. A couple of sessions in late March re-establishes it, and each year you keep more than the last.
11. Learn habitat and season as part of the identification.A song from a reedbed in April, a song from a bare moor, a song at two in the morning — the context narrows the possibilities enormously before you have identified a single note.

Tips

• The dawn chorus starts before it is light and the order the species join in is fairly consistent — blackbird and robin early, then wren and thrushes. Learning the order is a shortcut in itself.
• A robin singing under a streetlight at midnight is the answer to most 'what bird sings at night in Britain' questions. Nightingales are rare and local.
• Sound carries differently in woodland and in the open. The same bird can sound quite different at fifty metres through trees.
• Cup your hands behind your ears. It genuinely works, and it helps with direction as well as volume.
• Learn the mimics — starlings imitate other birds, phones and car alarms, and they are responsible for a great many puzzling sounds.

Common mistakes

• Trying to learn from recordings alone — Without a bird attached, the sounds do not stick, and recordings are cleaner and closer than anything you hear in the field.
• Learning fifty species in a week — They blur together and none of them stays. Five at a time, learned properly, compound year on year.
• Playing recordings out loud in the field to attract birds — It draws territorial birds away from nests and wastes their energy defending against an intruder that is not there. It is discouraged everywhere and prohibited on many reserves and for scarce species.

Questions people ask