Webinar: Learning Birdsong with Tom Stephenson [Part 1 of 2] by Wildside Nature Tours

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About This Webinar

HOW TO HEAR MORE ACCURATELY

Identifying the warblers and other species singing around us is one of the most enjoyable and satisfying aspects of birding. However trying to learn and remember bird vocalizations can be very difficult! And the transliterations in current field guides don’t help very much.

In this talk we’ll discuss more objective and useful approaches, using spectrograms and objective terms, which can really help you hear more accurately. We’ll then apply these techniques to a few sets of confusing vocalizations to show how spectrograms are a powerful way of studying and separating similar-sounding songs.

We’ll also discuss using Song Finders and the best approaches to identifying an unknown song. You’ll learn how understanding a song’s structure, and the characteristics of the Elements and Phrases that make up a song, can speed up the identification process and even make it easier to remember all kinds of vocalizations.
We’ll then take a “virtual” bird walk through Prospect Park and discover how the concepts we learned can help us identify the different species and understand what’s unique about their songs and calls.

Presenter

Tom Stephenson

Author, Photographer

Tom Stephenson has been birding since he was a kid under the tutelage of Dr. Arthur Allen of Cornell University. His articles and photographs are in museums and many publications including Birding, Birdwatcher’s Digest, Handbook of the Birds and Handbook of the Mammals of the World, and Guide to the Birds of SE Brazil.

He has lectured and guided many groups across the US as well as in Asia, where he trained guides for the government of Bhutan. He has donated many recordings of African and Eastern Himalayan rarities and other species to Cornell’s Macaulay Library of Natural sounds.
He was on Zeiss’s digiscoping team for the World Series of Birding and in 2011 his team won the World Series Cape Island Cup.
Tom and team also hold the US record for a Photo Big Day, capturing 208 species on camera in a 24-hour period.

As a musician he played concerts and did studio work for many years, working with several Grammy and Academy Award winners as well as performing with members of the NY Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His clients included the Grateful Dead, Phil Collins and the FBI. He joined Roland Corporation in 1991, managed the recorder division, and retired recently as Director of Technology.

His latest book, The Warbler Guide, is published by Princeton University Press and recently won the National Outdoor Book Award. The Warbler Guide App won the 2015 Design Award for AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal Show. His recent app, BirdGenie, is a “shazam” for bird song.