Are you listening or just hearing?
It seems a great deal of the creative inspiration that makes its way here originates from the first dog walk of the day. There hasn’t been very much to actually happen yet mind you but I believe some combination of: just having recently emerged from a night’s rest, not having to have purposefully engaged my mental capacities toward very much of anything yet, along with the lack of very much activity happening around me to distract me offers the perfect opportunity to ponder just long enough to find some topic I would like to explore further before the dog walking task at hand is complete. This morning’s walk was no different. There was nothing particularly special about it and aside from the specific weather conditions and date/time it took place, there wasn’t anything that really set it apart from any of the others I have experienced. In fact, this morning’s thoughts were a bit of a rerun as I had them on more than one occasion. I wrote briefly about them on my eBird profile but aside from Rob if he happens to ever read this, I feel quite confident that no one has seen them there so I plan to repeat at least some of them here and expand on them today.
When you break it down at a fundamental level, hearing is the process of sound waves reaching our eardrums which cause vibrations that in turn become electrical impulses that the brain uses to help you add context to the world. These sound waves could be purposefully generated such as when a bird sings out to try and attract a mate, to warn other birds, or maybe just because they feel like singing. Sound could also be the byproduct of any action that results in sound waves. It starts getting a little tricker if you explore the old philosophical “if a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound? “question as the dependency on someone being around to receive those sound waves is introduced. It is in the same vein as this tree falling question that I want to explore that dependency when there is sound present but it can be experienced differently.
I’ve briefly introduced Rob through a couple of my posts already but not to the level of depth that is required for today’s musings. I met Rob at a previous mutual employer of ours several years ago. He has since retired and I am no longer at that same company but during the time our employed paths overlapped, we had a number of years to interact with each other so that a genuine friendship developed between us. Part of this was blind luck and opportunity. We didn’t always work on the same businesses while we were there so any interactions we might have had would have been brief and by chance. When I first joined the company, employees were dispersed across multiple office buildings so I was limited to who I might see in a day by building assignment. A few years later, there was a consolidation effort into a single campus that brought most of the scattered employees together in one place. The campus had a big unified office complex with multiple floors and I would almost always run into someone new every single day even if it just was an outside vendor coming in for the first time so I certainly didn’t meet everyone. There was an A/B and C/D side element to the building since it spanned across a breezeway which connected the two elements which meant I didn’t even occupy the same silo as some employees. I happened to be in the A/B side and spent the majority of my time there.
There came a time where that all changed for Rob and I when we did start working on the same businesses. More importantly, our work stations became within earshot proximity as there was a tendency to group employees together based upon business or function. This provided the opportunity for us to interact on a daily basis even if our assigned tasks or meetings for the day did not align. Little by little and day by day we got to know one another and the depth of our bond grew to the point of me considering him my friend. Somewhere along the way we found ourselves sharing inside jokes about our common workplace experiences, literally working together on some work tasks, and more importantly sharing the other parts of our lives outside of work such as details about our families and our interests and hobbies.
One of Rob’s interests he shared with me lies at the heart of the listening or hearing theme I wanted to introduce today: birdwatching. Watching perhaps immediately implies seeing or observing with your eyes when you read it. While there is a great deal of emphasis placed on the visual aspects: the optics that are required to participate fully in birdwatching (binoculars and scopes) as well as literally using your eyes to detect movement or leverage color/marking patterns for bird identification, your ears can play just as significant of a role in birdwatching and often are the only way you know the bird is present. Owls aren’t exactly showing themselves all throughout the day as they tend to be nocturnal and even for species that do, sometimes the only way you know they are there is from the sounds they make.
Our third floor work station proximity, presented a unique opportunity. Rob’s pod was located next to the outside edge of the building. This edge was basically expansive glass which ran the full width of the building offering a shielded view from the outside sun for those inside if the shade was pulled down. Outside that glass grew a series of river birches that allowed him to view birds through his window undetected and they would frequently land in these trees. Being the experienced birder that he is, he would be able to talk to someone sitting right in front of him and flit his eyes away just enough to catch a glimpse of the movement his peripheral vision detected to identify the bird that was the source of the movement and return to the conversation without missing a beat. It was quite an impressive skill. I witnessed it for myself on more than one occasion and started asking him to educate me on what he was seeing too. We even dubbed the perching vantage point the “RBO” which stood for river birch oasis. There was also a balcony not too far from us that he would encourage me to go outside with him to see something as he observed. Fall and Spring migrations would bring a share of birds just passing through on their way to other regions either further North or South along with the local birds that stayed present year round. He would point ones out that caught his attention every chance he could.
Rob kept encouraging me to join him more formally in birding sometime outside of the work confined ones. His personality and enthusiasm for this activity along with the patience and willingness to bring others into the birdwatching fold regardless of experience level was hard to resist. He actually taught a birdwatching class so he had a teaching pedigree already. He introduced me to eBird as the records of his sightings were kept there as a means of keeping track. Once you see that the first observations he had included were made before you were even born, it is both intimidating and impressive at the same time.
Geography and opportunity play a key role in what someone can see and record in eBird as either you have the bird come to you or you have to go to it. The program chooses to group reported sighting in the United States for example by county and state and will rank those making the individual observations within those various geographic levels by the quantity observed within a specific geographic area. This creates a little bit of a collection/achievement mentality as once a bird is observed in a county or state, it “colors” it in on eBird and the color’s intensity changes as more individual unique species are recorded in that same geographical area. North Carolina for example has 100 counties that could potentially be logged with a sighting. Rob has a personal stated goal of coloring in all 100 counties with at least 50 sightings in each one. This means the state bird of the cardinal will appear in several if not all of the 100 county lists trying to reach that 50 sightings goal but there will also be plenty of unique observations that will be made along the way.
Occasionally a bird will be spotted and reported by fellow birders that “should not be here “. It’s normal habitat might be in the western half of the United States say but for one reason or another it has been spotted in one of our 100 counties. What would be a common everyday sighting in Colorado has now become a “rare bird” sighting in North Carolina. How they get here no one is really sure but as Rob likes to always say: birds can’t read a map. Rare bird sightings like these along with Rob’s enthusiasm for reaching the 50 sightings per county goal often results in him embarking on what is referred to as a “chase”. This takes him to a county and potentially through several counties along the way that present the opportunity to color in previously blank ones and in some cases also see a bird for the first time ever which is referred to as a “lifer”. While you could certainly make your way to Colorado to see the same bird rather easily, a “rare bird” carries with it the opportunity to log something in North Carolina that only those who make the effort will also be able to do. The added possibility of it being a “lifer” too only furthers the motivation for Rob to drive hours to the coast and return back in the same day for the opportunity to log such a sighting. I have actually accompanied him on a few of these chases myself.
One of the biggest tools in Rob’s birdwatching tool kit is his ability to identify a bird without having to actually see them. He has honed this skill by listening to recordings of birds to the point that he can identify a species by even a single note or “chit”. Experience and time has played a role in bringing him to this point but he also made a focused effort to get there. The way he has described it to me is envision listening to an orchestra with multiple instruments playing at the same time but being able to focus and pick out just the notes being played by a single instrument. It is quite an impressive skill. He and I can be walking along together with our ears having access to the exact same set of sounds and he will suddenly pause even if we are in an active conversation because he has detected something that stands out. He is listening while I am hearing.
The intentionality of this shift to listening instead of hearing can be just as important even at a personal level for the observer without having someone else present to compare against. I have heard birds and accompanying sounds all my life. Except maybe for the memory of hearing the very distinctive bobwhite while growing up or knowing the chit of our state bird the cardinal after many years of being exposed to it, all of the bird sounds I heard before venturing out with Rob had been just background sounds and noise for the most part. I had access to them but it was mostly just me hearing them being made and it stopping there. Once I went out birding a couple of times with him, I now found myself listening instead of just hearing birds and it is transformative.
Almost all of my morning dog walks are accompanied by some degree of bird sounds. Over time, I have been able to develop a sufficient enough ability to also identify some of them now just by these sounds. The early morning walks have produced successful owl “sightings” to record in eBird that might not have otherwise been possible. Even if I just hear the same birds that I have already heard before, I now know some of the ones that are there with me on my walk that morning. I still hear things I question or am not so sure about as my skill is nowhere near the level that Rob has but what a difference being more focused on listening has brought to these walks. I highly recommend taking the listening approach over just hearing every chance you get no matter what the situation.
