Living Bird Magazine (Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology)
Review, Living Bird magazine, Winter 2004, page 44.
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SongFinder
My companion was staring intently at a nearby spruce clump. "There's a Golden-crowned Kinglet singing," he said. "Where? I don't hear anything," I said sadly.
Although I can still hear conversation quite well, experiences like the above have slowly lead me to the unhappy realization that high-pitched sounds have become largely inaudible to me. Thanks to the SongFinder, however, I have been spared the frustrating finality of my high-end hearing loss. I can again clearly hear Golden-crowned Kinglets and Brown Creepers and even warblers, insects, and frogs that had been silent to my ears for many years.
I first heard about the SongFinder in the fall of 2002 in a casual conversation with Greg Budney, audio curator at the Lab's Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds. I told him that after a full summer's intense but unsuccessful experimentation with hearing aids, it had become clear to me that they were not the answer. They were just not intended to reproduce the high sounds I longed to hear. Greg told me about the pitch-lowering device that Lang Elliott used to counter his high-pitched hearing loss. I contacted Lang at once to learn more.
He generously invited me to visit his studio and try his personal unit. What an experience! The instant I put on the headset I was hearing sounds I had not heard for nearly 30 years. Since the relative pitches were the same, the fact that the sounds were in a lower frequency than I remembered them was not nearly as troublesome as I had expected. This was what I was looking for, and I had to have one. Lang told me that he and his partner, engineer Herb Sussman, were developing a more compact digital unit and hoped to market it to the birding public by the spring of 2003. I asked to be put on the waiting list for the SongFinder and began anxiously waiting for Herb and Lang to produce a marketable unit that I could buy.
In February 2003, Herb called and said he had a prototype I could try out. I picked it up that day. Wow, was it neat. It was compact, powerful, comfortable, and amazingly effective. On my first trip afield I heard a Black-capped Chickadee's spring calls and song, sounds I only vaguely recognized from years past. I quickly realized, to my delight, that I could actually locate feeding chickadee flocks some distance away by sound alone. Even Cedar Waxwing fly-overs rarely eluded me. It was awesome!
Winter soon ended and the spring migration kicked into high gear. Every day brought new challenges and new opportunities to test my skills as a novice ear birder. I have a lot of catching up to do and I have put the SongFinder through a grueling, almost daily workout for many months now. The longer I work with it the better I like it.
With the SongFinder I can quickly find a singing bird, even at fairly great distances. I can drive slowly through grasslands with the car windows down and locate singing Grasshopper Sparrows. Warblers that I couldn't hear singing even from a few feet away now reveal themselves by song alone from 100 yards or more away. I used to envy beginning birders the overwhelming excitement of seeing their first Scarlet Tanager. The SongFinder has made me a beginning birder again. Every day is charged with the excitement of fresh new experiences.
By Bard Prentiss, Regional Coordinator New York State Breeding Bird Atlas Region 3
prentissb@cortland.edu
607-844-4691
