I love the quiet I experience from living on Little Cranberry Island. I remember a visit from Dutch friends when their mouths dropped open upon reaching our house. I asked what stunned them and they replied, “The quiet! There is so little noise!”
That’s what I like. I also appreciate the crescendo of the spring soundscape as it arrives. After a stormy winter I find hearing the sound of more boat engines nearby is comforting. On good weather days there are more people out and about. There is not a lot of vehicle noise here, by mainland standards, but as more people arrive it increases.
I can hear my husband laugh from down the road as he listens to stories from a neighbor who has just returned. I welcome the whole spring increase in aural activity, especially when it comes to the birds.
I can hear my husband laugh from down the road as he listens to stories from a neighbor who has just returned.
By April the robins and the starlings are singing with the cardinals, chickadees and nuthatches. The song sparrows and white-throated sparrows chime in a few weeks later, their songs a clear and constant promise that summer is coming.
The pileated woodpecker calls from the woods, sounding just as prehistoric as he looks. Juncoes sing near the feeder and the goldfinches travel around in chatty bunches.
By the end of May the hardwood leaves are almost full size, making the quick little warblers hard to identify by sight. When we’re out for a walk I can ask my sister-in-law Karen what bird I just heard and she will say, “black throated green,” or “common yellowthroat.” In the glorious weeks approaching the solstice the birds want to make themselves heard and I want to know who they are.
My mother was the one who taught me to listen for the change in a robin’s song when it was about to rain. She identified the different calls of cardinals, but that’s all I remember about bird songs from childhood. She knew a lot of birds by sight and loved checking them off in her bird book. How she would love experiencing the Merlin app on my cell phone.
Do you have Merlin on your phone? It’s a bird identification app with sections for photo ID and sound ID for birds in your area. The program is free from Cornell, where it is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and many friends of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
While the photo ID section was first publicly released in late 2017, the sound ID program has only been around since June of 2021. Both Karen and I learned about it from listening to a seminar online when it was first introduced. Maybe everyone has it on their phone now, but it feels new to me at this time of year since I don’t use it in the winter. (Quiet birds and time indoors.)
Recently I decided to sit quietly on my back porch after lunch to try a sort of “listening meditation.” With Merlin’s sound recorder going I closed my eyes. I could hear a few crows and a persistent red-breasted nuthatch, but not much else. (Yes, my hearing has suffered with age.)
After three minutes I opened my eyes and looked down at my screen. Merlin had recorded a hairy woodpecker, a red-breasted nuthatch, an American goldfinch, a northern cardinal, a purple finch, an eastern towhee, and an American crow. I knew a few of the birds but some I would never have guessed. Seven different birds in three minutes!
Our postmaster, Joy, was on a meeting the other day and left her phone in the window with Merlin recording for about half an hour. Merlin had identified the songs of 29 different birds. There may have been even more, but as Joy was starting to scroll through, her battery ran out and the recording was never saved.
“I know there were at least two I didn’t expect to see on there. A wood duck and a Nashville warbler,” she said.
For many of us on the islands, late spring conversation is all about the birds. “What have you seen, who have you heard?” It’s fun to find out from Merlin just how many birds are out there that we can’t see. At this time of year they’re all talking.
They might even be saying something about us!
If you want more information about Merlin, here is a link to find out about it on-line: https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
Barbara Fernald lives and listens on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island). She may be contacted at Fernald244@gmail.com.
