Although the trickle of returning migrants typically becomes more like a flood this time of year, actually seeing some of those little warblers and other birds can be tricky, as their arrival corresponds with the leaf-out of trees.

Thus your best tool for finding and identifying birds becomes your ears. Just yesterday morning we were having breakfast in the kitchen when we heard the familiar cadence of “TEACH-er, TEACH-er, TEACH-er” emanating from the backyard.

We never did see the bird, but we knew it was our first ovenbird of the year returning from a winter in Central America or the Caribbean.
Learning bird songs and calls can seem a little overwhelming at first, just like learning a new language. However, once you are able to identify more of the sounds, it is amazing how many more birds you find.

One way to help make it easier is to learn the different songs is to categorize them based on song characteristics. So, for example, you have the “trillers,” birds whose song consists of a rapidly uttered and often long series of short notes, like a drum roll. Our most common triller in Maine is the chipping sparrow, a small, red-capped sparrow with unstreaked breast that nests in just about every yard that has some lawn.

Its rather nondescript trilling song becomes summer background music even for folks who don’t even realize it’s there. In many parts of the Boothbay peninsula and other parts of Maine, where there are spruce, hemlock, or balsam fir, you often find another of the trillers: the dark-eyed junco.

The junco looks nothing like the chipping sparrow, as it is mostly dark all over with a little pink bill and with white sides to the tail that flare when it flies. But the chipping sparrow song sounds very similar, some would say even almost identical, to the dark-eyed junco. The junco’s song tends to be a little more high-pitched and thinner, less forceful than the chipping sparrow, but even many an experienced birder has been fooled by this one!

Another song category that is useful to consider is the so-called “sing-songers,” birds that sing a song like the American robin, with a series of repeated phrases. Once you know the robin’s song you can use it for comparison to some others, like the scarlet tanager that we think of as “a robin with a sore throat” or the rose-breasted grosbeak, whose song is like a syrupy sweet version of the robin’s.

Some birds, like the ovenbird we mentioned earlier, have songs that can be represented by easy-to-remember phrases. The white-throated sparrow is a favorite, with its whistled “Old-Sam-Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.” The yellow warbler sings a high-pitched “sweet-sweet-sweet, I’m so sweet,” usually from a low scrubby area near water.

From high up in a spruce tree you may hear the buzzy “zee-zee-zee-zoo-zee” of the black-throated green warbler.

In our book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds,” we put great care into helping bird enthusiasts make the connection between what they’re hearing and what they’re seeing. There are also many products focused specifically on song identification, from CDs and to bird song apps that can be downloaded for the iPod and smart phones. Tune in and see how many more species you start finding!   

Dr. Jeff Wells is the senior scientist for the Boreal Songbird Initiative. During his time at the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithology and as the Audubon Society's national bird conservation director, Dr. Wells earned a reputation as one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. Jeff's grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, also formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a widely published natural history writer and a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Together, they have been writing and teaching people about birds for decades. The Maine natives are authors of the highly acclaimed book, “Maine's Favorite Birds.”