Pickering Creek Audubon Center is delighted to announce that Nathan Pieplow, author of the Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds, will provide an accessible and entertaining introduction to “The Language of Birds” during a Zoom presentation on September 9, 2020 at 7:00 PM. All around us, birds are constantly telling us who they are and what they are doing. Nathan will unlock the secrets of their language and cue us in on what their calls and songs mean.
Growing up in South Dakota, Nathan started identifying bird songs by studying the classic “Birding By Ear” field guides in the Peterson series. It wasn’t until 2003, when he faced the frustrations of studying sounds for his first trips to Mexico and Costa Rica, that he became dedicated to finding new and better ways to learn, describe, and catalog bird sounds. Along the way he became a sound recordist and an amateur ethologist (a student of animal behavior).
Nathan says, “I’m not one of those superhuman beings who can identify every singing bird, or discern the nocturnal flight call of a Blackpoll Warbler as it passes overhead in the dark. My high-frequency hearing is getting worse every year, and I don’t have a great auditory memory. For me to learn bird sounds, I wanted more resources: more recordings, better glossaries, deeper discussions. So I set out to create my own resources.”
Nathan Pieplow is the author of the Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds, published in two volumes, Eastern (2017) and Western (2019). An avid bird sound recordist and videographer, he is the author of the bird sound blog Earbirding, a board member of the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, an author of the Colorado Birding Trail, and former editor of the journal Colorado Birds. He teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
To Register: https://act.audubon.org/a/
Pickering Creek Audubon Center is open daily from 7:00AM to 7:00PM. The Center features four miles of trails through varied habitat. During the current pandemic the center’s trails provide restorative time outside for individuals and families. The center also offers regular online programming for all ages which can be reviewed on the Center’s website, www.pickeringcreek.org.
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