By Sarah Stapperfenne
New Jersey Audubon’s Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary will offer “Learning the Birds by Song” workshops led by Randolph Scott Little, Cornell Lab of Ornithology Visiting Fellow and New Jersey resident. Class participants will learn to identify the sources of some of the most common sounds that punctuate the many different environments of New Jersey: bird calls.
“Learning the Birds by Song” will consist of six one-hour evening sessions beginning on March 13 and continuing through April 24. Participants are not required to attend all six workshops, but taking the workshops as a series will provide a comprehensive aural birding education. March 13 and 20 will cover the winter resident birds; April 3 and 10 will cover the early migrant birds, and April 17 and 24 will cover the summer resident birds.
Each session will begin with outdoor listening at the Wildlife Sanctuary and wrap-up indoors with critical listening to recorded sounds likely to be heard in central New Jersey at that stage of the spring season. Emphasis will be placed on how to learn to identify the sources and meanings of natural sounds. Numerous memory aids and “tricks of the trade” will be shared.
Little is a long-time New Jersey Audubon volunteer and former member of its board. In addition to his status as Visiting Fellow, he has also served on the administrative board of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and teaches its annual Sound Recording Workshop. Little states, “I am enthusiastic about passing along much of the training offered by my childhood mentors, Drs. Arthur A. Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg, which was supplemented by my own decades of experience recording bird sounds throughout North America.”
Little’s recordings of bird songs can be discovered in everyday objects: Any tapes, CDs, clocks, plush toys, or other devices containing bird sounds are likely to contain Little’s work. He has donated all of his recordings to the Macaulay Library at the Laboratory of Ornithology.
Why learn to bird by ear? Little states, “The vast majority of birds use sounds to communicate with each other. Not only can these sounds be very effective at directing our visual attention, in many cases they are totally diagnostic. What a marvelous tool for quickly assessing what is hidden in a thicket, or leading one to track down its source for the pleasure of a visual identification.”
Pre-registration is required for the workshops, and participants do not need to attend all six classes. The per-class prices of the workshops are $10 for New Jersey Audubon members and $15 for non-members. For more information or to pre-register call 908-766-5787, email [email protected], or visit the Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary section of the New Audubon website, at www.njaudubon.org. The Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary is located at 11 Hardscrabble Road in Bernardsville, New Jersey.

