A Jersey radio guy discovers birding — and now I can’t stop listening

I have been in radio for a long time. Sound is my whole professional life. I notice things other people tune out — the way a voice changes when someone is nervous, the difference between dead air that is comfortable and dead air that is panic, the exact moment a song should end. Sound is how I experience the world.

So I find it a little embarrassing that I spent most of my adult life completely ignoring half the sounds around me.

Birds. They were just there. Background. Something that sang too early in the morning when you wanted to sleep, ate the worms in the yard, sat on the feeder and occasionally made a mess of your car. I knew the big three — robins, blue jays, cardinals. The sounds in heavy rotation. Everything else was just noise.

Then about five years ago something shifted. It started with a feeder. Then a birdbath. Then standing in the backyard one morning wondering what exactly was making that sound in the oak tree. And then I found the Merlin app — Cornell Lab's free bird identification tool — and everything changed.

SEE ALSO: The 5 best South Jersey hikes below Route 70 — all 7 miles or less 

A Radio Guy Discovers the Soundtrack He Was Missing

Merlin does something remarkable. You open it on your phone, hit the sound ID button, and it listens. Within seconds it starts identifying every bird calling in your vicinity — species name, photo, the exact call it just heard — in real time. It is like having a bird expert standing next to you on the trail whispering names in your ear.

For someone who has spent his career living in sound, this was not just useful. It was revelatory.

I care more about what a bird sounds like than what it looks like. I am not out there with binoculars scanning the canopy trying to spot a flash of color. I am standing still, phone out, listening. When Merlin identifies something I have never heard before and I can add it to my life list, I get a genuine little thrill that I am not going to apologize for.

I am at 108 birds on my life list. Not a number that would impress a serious birder. But every one of them is a sound I now recognize that I used to walk right past.

The Three Places Where My List Grows

The Shore, the Pines, and our family cabin up in Sullivan County Pennsylvania. Those are my three hunting grounds — though hunting is the wrong word entirely. Standing still and listening is closer to it.

The Pine Barrens hikes I have been doing this spring have been extraordinary for this. The Barrens have their own acoustic character — the way sound travels differently through the scrub oak and pitch pine than through a hardwood forest. The birds down there are not always the birds you hear in your backyard. The first time Merlin identified a pine warbler for me on a trail near Batsto I stood there for about two minutes just listening to it repeat itself.

At the Shore the laughing gulls and the ospreys are obvious. But it is the smaller sounds — the willets in the marsh grass, the clapper rails you hear but almost never see — that Merlin has taught me to notice. I grew up going to the Shore my whole life and I never once identified a clapper rail. They were always there. I just was not listening.

The Bobolink Is Why We Drive to Pennsylvania Every June

Our family cabin is in Sullivan County Pennsylvania, in the Endless Mountains. We have been going up there for years and the early June trip has become something I genuinely look forward to for a reason that would have baffled me ten years ago.

The bobolink.

If you have never heard a bobolink, I want you to look it up right now. It sounds exactly like R2D2 from Star Wars — a cascading, bubbling, electronic-sounding call that seems like it could not possibly come from a living bird. The bobolink is a meadow bird, a grassland species, and the fields around our cabin in early June are full of them.

We plan the trip specifically around the bobolink window. A few weeks away now. I am already thinking about it.

Judi says that sometimes when she is with me and Kyle she feels like she is dealing with fourth graders. She is not entirely wrong. There is something genuinely childlike about getting excited over a bird called a wrentit — which I added to my life list on December 30th in Eureka, California, while visiting our daughter, and yes I giggled when Merlin said the name out loud.

I am a 108-bird lister who drives to Pennsylvania every June to hear R2D2 in a field. And I would not change a single thing about that.

Get the App — and Then Go Outside

If you have been doing any of the hikes I have written about this spring — the Pine Barrens trails, the North Jersey routes above Route 80, Old Mine Road in the Water Gap — download Merlin before you go. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, free, works offline once you download the regional bird pack.

You do not have to care about birds. You just have to care about sound. Stand still for thirty seconds on any trail in New Jersey and hit the button. What comes back will surprise you.

I spent my whole career in radio paying attention to sound. It took me until my 50s to realize I had a free concert playing outside my window every single morning and I kept hitting snooze on it.

The wrentit giggle was worth the wait.