Birding Update / Digital Bird Song Hearing Aids

Featured in this Show

• Bird Expert Starts Blog To Help Birders Deal With Aging-Related Issues

  Download

  Getting older can add a new set of challenges to enjoying the outdoors, but according to Laura Erickson, aging should not mean the end of birding.

  Erickson, an expert birder and author of eight bird books, said turning 64 last month hasn’t slowed her down when she hits the trail, accompanied by her new birding dog Pip. To help share her knowledge with other birders, including those who are a bit longer in the tooth, Erickson recently started a new blog called Little Old Lady in Tennis Shoes.

  Erickson said Wednesday that her plan for the blog is to focus on helping birders deal with issues like skin cancer, accessibility and vision problems, such as learning to use binoculars with bifocals. The first topic Erickson took on was one she’s personally had to deal with: trouble hearing bird songs.

  Erickson said that she recently began to notice that the high-pitched trills and whistles she could pick out when she was younger had drifted outside her hearing range. With the help of an audiologist, Erickson invested in digital hearing aids that were calibrated to amplify higher-frequency sounds.

  “It has improved my hearing of Le Conte’s Sparrows and things like that by an order of magnitude,” Erickson said. “The tragedy is that even an order of magnitude isn’t that much, based on how much (hearing) I’ve lost already.”

  For those looking for a less expensive alternative, or who want hearing help exclusively for birding, Erickson suggested a device called the SongFinder invented by Lang Elliott and Herb Susmann in the mid-1990s. As opposed to digital hearing aids, which can quell background noise while clarifying certain sounds, the SongFinder changes the actual frequency of sounds.

  “In real time, while you’re listening with these headphones on and just this little pocket-sized thing, it actually changes the frequency, lowers them so you can hear them,” Erickson said.

  Erickson recently ran an experiment with her husband and two 29-year-olds to determine who could hear the farthest. She found that the SongFinder allowed her to hear Le Conte’s Sparrows as far as or even farther than the youngsters.

  The SongFinder can pick up bird sounds from a greater distance and detect a greater number of birds nearby.

  “It doesn’t sound quite the same, but you can still identify them. And now you can hear them again,” Erickson said.

  Both the SongFinder and digital hearing aids have their advantages and disadvantages, Erickson said, so it comes down to the individual birder’s preferences.