Ok so you’re outside and just saw with your binoculars that the red-winged bird is clearly the one that emits sounds A and B.
Later you also watch a robin making sound C.
And you recall that yesterday you observed a sparrow doing the sounds D and E.
You also suspect that the sparrow is the one that makes sound F but don’t know for sure.
And you also heard the calls G and H and have no idea who does that (maybe you’ll find out another day, but would be nice to remember these sounds on their own in the meantime).
You don’t have words to describe them, and imitating them with your voice is too difficult and not accurate enough.
Let’s say your auditory mental imagery is good (i.e. you can reproduce sounds in your mind very clearly), but not your memory for sounds (i.e. after a few hours you already forgot everything you heard).
I haven’t used these kinds of memory techniques for bird songs, but there is a discussion about bird songs here. I learned a lot of bird songs through Peterson’s Birding by Ear Eastern Edition (USA).
The CDs group the birds into categories instead of by species, and then show how to distinguish the similar sounds from each other. I really liked it and think it’s a good system.
For example, if you hear a bird imitating multiple bird sounds, you can narrow it down to about three species in the “mimics” category, and then distinguish them by simple rules: mockingbirds tend to imitate other birds in threes (or more), brown thrashers in twos, and catbirds have a distinctive “meow”.
Here’s how they group the songs:
Disk 1
1 INTRODUCTION
2 MIMICS p. 11 Northern Mockingbird Brown Thrasher Gray Catbird
4 SING-SONGERS p. 16 American Robin Scarlet Tanager Summer Tanager Rose-breasted Grosbeak Red-eyed Vireo Yellow-throated Vireo
5 HAWKS p. 19 Broad-winged Hawk Red-tailed Hawk Red-shouldered Hawk
6 CHIPPERS AND TRILLERS p. 21 Swamp Sparrow Chipping Sparrow Dark-eyed Junco Pine Warbler
7 HIGH-PITCHERS p. 23 Cedar Waxwing Brown-headed Cowbird Eastern Kingbird European Starling
Disk 2
1 WHISTLERS p. 25 Northern Cardinal Tufted Titmouse Baltimore Oriole Eastern Meadowlark Field Sparrow White-throated Sparrow
2 OWLS AND A DOVE p. 29 Great Horned Owl Barred Owl Eastern Screech-Owl Mourning Dove
3 SIMPLE VOCALIZATIONS p. 31 Great Crested Flycatcher Acadian Flycatcher White-breasted Nuthatch American Woodcock Green Heron Black-crowned Night-Heron Ring-necked Pheasant
4 COMPLEX VOCALIZATIONS p. 35 Bobolink House Wren American Goldfinch
6 WARBLING SONGSTERS p. 40 House Finch Purple Finch Warbling Vireo Orchard Oriole
7 COMMONERS p. 42 Canada Goose American Crow Blue Jay House Sparrow Red-winged Blackbird Common Grackle Song Sparrow
Disk 3
1 WOOD WARBLERS AND A WARBLING WREN p. 46 Black-and-white Warbler Ovenbird Kentucky Warbler Carolina Wren Hooded Warbler Common Yellowthroat Yellow Warbler Northern Parula Black-throated Green Warbler American Redstart
2 THRUSHES p. 52 Wood Thrush Veery Hermit Thrush
3 UNUSUAL VOCALIZATIONS p. 54 Ruffed Grouse American Woodcock American Bittern
4 MISCELLANEOUS VOCALIZATIONS p. 56 Chimney Swift White-eyed Vireo Eastern Bluebird Eastern Towhee HABITAT GROUPINGS Eastern Forests
5 Forest Edges Blue Jay Wood Thrush Gray Catbird Downy Woodpecker Eastern Wood-Pewee Rose-breasted Grosbeak Eastern Phoebe Great Crested Flycatcher Red-eyed Vireo American Goldfinch
6 Forest Interiors Ruffed Grouse White-breasted Nuthatch Broad-winged Hawk Ovenbird Barred Owl Hairy Woodpecker Veery Black-throated Green Warbler Black-and-white Warbler House Wren Scarlet Tanager 7 Throughout American Crow Baltimore Oriole Red-tailed Hawk American Robin Eastern Screech-Owl Common Grackle
8 Freshwater Wetlands Swamp Sparrow American Bittern Red-winged Blackbird Green Heron Belted Kingfisher Black-crowned Night-Heron Canada Goose
Great! Those CDs look exactly like the kind of thing I wanted but had no idea existed or how to search for it, looking forward to getting them in the mail!
BTW that thread is amazing, although a lot of links that also seemed very interesting don’t work anymore
I’ve just updated the broken links, so they should all work now.
While fixing the links I stumbled across another one in the series called More Birding by Ear by the same authors. It looks like it’s out of print though.
I like the blog post by Dick Walton where he lists some mnemonics that one can use to remember and identify bird songs, which consists in translating the sound into either of these three: phonetics (what does it seem like the bird is saying), written descriptions (what familiar sound does it remind you of and how does it differ from it), and diagrams or drawings (what would it look like if you could see it).
I had already thought about all these and tried without much success (not even trying to connect them to the bird: I miserably failed just trying to remember the sounds a little bit later), but seeing that there’s no other trick listed here makes me think that maybe I just need to do more of it - exactly like for other memory techniques, at first they seemed to be useless for me.
Also I don’t know how but I just ended up finding the Smithsonian Guide to North American Bird Songs and Sounds. Can’t be searched by bird, but it gives a good idea of how can sounds be described and categorized, which could be a backup way to remember and identify them if the other ways don’t work: how many notes, speed, clear or unmusical parts, pitch level and pattern, duration, repetition, distinctive beginning or end