What do you do with the observations of bird language that you make while you are in the field? Well, more important than just making notes in a field journal, is the actual development of that information after you get home.
Participants in the bird language intensives create maps every single time they come back from their secret spots. By mapping over and over again, your brain begins to recognize, in greater and greater detail, the many subtleties of the environment around you. That’s when bird language really begins to make sense. The more you know your place, the better you’ll be able to interpret bird language.
Map the major landmarks of your sit area, and the locations of the birds you observed. If a bird alarmed, note where it was when it alarmed. The same goes for songs, and for any call notes that occurred, or even for patches of silence that you may have noticed. It is all part of the story.
Eventually, when you get home and you’ve done the map and recreated the situation from your spot, it’s a good idea to do a little journaling. Try from your memory to recreate the situation. Go back in your mind, remember the events as you saw them, remember the events as you heard them, and try to tell the story. In the beginning you’ll be struggling, and you won’t have a clue what to write, but in time you’ll begin to recognize patterns.
This is just like tracking, but instead of following footprints through the snow or sand, what you’re now doing is following footprints through the bird alarms. Bird alarms are your medium. You’ll begin to recognize that all of these alarms have a shape and intensity, a movement and a direction. Once you see this you’ll begin to read the concentric rings.
It is always in going back home at night, and reflecting over what you experienced during the day, that brings the good questions up in your mind. These are the questions that tomorrow will drive you to look even closer, and to try even harder. That’s why mapping and journaling are so important in learning bird language.
