Nature Done Wright

My backyard chickadees let me know when their birdfeeders are empty. Photo Credit: Alan Pomerantz.

My latest column for The Record ponders the question: Can some wild birds recognize individual humans by our voices? Here goes:

By Jim Wright

Special to The Record | USA TODAY NETWORK – NEW JERSEY

Please don’t think me crazy, but sometimes I talk to birds. And I believe they sometimes talk to me. Not just any old wild birds, mind you – just certain birds in my yard, my hometown and my favorite birding haunts.

The backyard chickadees started it all several years back. I noticed that when I walked through the front door on winter mornings, they’d fly to the nearest tree branch and badger me to refill the feeders.

I’d tell them to hold their horses, and they waited impatiently while I went inside and got a scoop full of birdseed, and then followed me to the feeder. On the other hand, if the feeders were full, they ignored me. I had become part of their morning routine.

Soon after, when I kept an eye on several raptor nests in my area, I adopted a similar chatty strategy. I figured that while chickadees recognized me by sight, hawks and falcons and owls might also grow accustomed to the sound of my voice and accept me more readily.  

Thus, when I monitored a pair of red-shouldered hawks that breed in my hometown, I began by keeping my distance and talking to them in a conversational voice. The goal was to observe them without disrupting their nesting activities. And it has worked without fail. 

My approach is a variation on the advice of the famed author J.A. Baker. After following a pair of falcons wintering in the English countryside in the 1960s, he wrote: “To be recognized and accepted by a peregrine, you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order.” I merely talk in a soothing voice to the raptors as well.

    I am no latter-day Dr. Doolittle who talks to animals like an escapee from an old Disney flick. Because of my severe allergy to movie musicals, I never saw the 1967 movie of the same name, but I’m told that it involves a veterinarian who speaks in several animal languages and brags about it in (gasp!) song.

Although I’m confident my chatting strategy works, the research has been spotty. We know that crows can recognize individual people – especially ones they don’t like. And we know that in falconry, peregrines and other raptors recognize their keepers by voice. My hunch is that many bird species are a lot smarter on certain levels than we give them credit for.

There’s only one avian species I would never talk to. This blackbird is rarely seen in the wild in North Jersey, but I would ignore it anywhere. I don’t want to be accused of contributing to the delinquency of a mynah.

Do you talk to birds? And are you willing to share your reasons? Please tell me more. Just email me at the address below, and include with your name and hometown.

The Bird Watcher column appears every other Thursday. Email Jim at celeryfarm@gmail.com.