A new generation of birders tune in

Story by Jack Belanger

Photos by Arthur Maiorella

One sound seemed to follow Steve Kinne for more than 2,000 miles as he hiked the Appalachian Trail.

“Chick-burr”

The Air Force veteran was puzzled. Kinne kept glancing up at the trees, hoping the source would identify itself.

“Chick-burr”

 “It drove me crazy that I didn’t know what it was,” Kinne said. “And I didn’t have time to really stop and go look for it.”

The call didn’t leave Kinne during his hike. Nor did it leave his mind as he continued north on the trail throughout the summer of 2006.

Once he returned home to Canastota, Kinne researched the bird calls he had heard, first tracking down what bird produced the “chick-burr.”

 “Of all the birds, it happened to be a scarlet tanager,” Kinne said. “Now, here’s a brilliant red scarlet colored bird, you know, with black wings. But just, you know, something you think would be easy to see, but they’re up in the treetops. You can’t really see them too well when the leaves are out.”

That moment on the trail helped launch Kinne into birding. Not only did he become active in the Onondaga chapter of the Audubon Society (OAS), the 69-year-old led the club’s efforts in teaching dozens of others “birding by ear” — using the 36-mile Old Erie Canal Historic Park as his classroom.

Kinne has been an outdoor enthusiast ever since his time as a Boy Scout. While April through June are reserved for birding during the spring migration, he’s active outdoors year-round.

“I have my years kind of divided up into quarters,” Kinne said. “The spring quarter, that’s birds.  Summers are trails, falls are hunting, winters are hemlock woolly adelgid surveys.”

Inspired by his experience along the Appalachian Trail, he grew particularly fond of identifying birds by their songs and calls.

But when he started going on trips with the OAS, Kinne found he was missing out on what birds the group was listening to. Though the group leader was picking out the birds and their songs, the bird’s actual name got lost by the time it reached the back of the line, like a game of telephone.

“I started working with a couple of people that were (in the back),” Kinne said. “I started asking them a question. ‘Well, what are you hearing? What does it sound like to you?’”

It didn’t take long before Kinne’s persistent curiosity caught on with others.

“We’d identify it, and when we did that enough, they finally said, ‘You know what, you got to teach a course,’” Kinne said.

Arthur Maiorella

Members of the weekly “Birding by Ear” class raise hands in response to a question from instructor Steve Kinne about identifying birds based on their calls at the Manlius Public Library.

Kinne started teaching the OAS’s beginning and advanced “Birding by Ear” courses in 2017. The courses started at a time when birding shifted from its senior-citizen-on-the-bench image to people of all ages and abilities actively identifying birds with their eyes, their ears and even their phones.

Kinne uses field trips to reinforce what he teaches during classes by giving his students a variety of ways to learn bird calls: mnemonics (an easy one for most is the chickadee as it sounds like chickadee-dee-dee), practice listening to recordings and listening-and-searching in the field.

Kinne uses these field trips to put students’ skills to the test. He brings the class out to a stretch along the Erie Canal between his town and Chittenango during the spring migration months.

Kinne wants to make sure he knows which birds will likely be in the area. With easy parking access, flat trails and a location away from residential areas, he can keep his eyes and ears open, ready to spot his next bird.

“The important thing about being a guide or the teacher is you’ve got to know what’s there,” Kinne said. “So the more time I spend on a couple of these areas, then the more familiar I am with what birds are typically there.”

With countless hours and trips spent walking the Canal, Kinne can regularly identify more than 90 bird species just along the waterway’s trails.

“The list would be long,” he said.“I would say you kind of have to sort of divide it up into what kind of habitat are you looking at.”

The variety of habitats along the Canal opens the opportunity for a wide range of birds to call the corridor home.

Matching habitat to bird, Kinne lists off an array of species in seconds: catbirds and yellow warblers in the trees and shrubs, spotted sandpipers along the water, field sparrows in the fields and red-winged blackbirds in the swamps.

Despite his ability to recall just about every bird in the county, Kinne doesn’t keep what birders call a “life list” that would contain the different species of birds a birder has recorded over their lifetime.

“I love being out in nature. I love listening to birds,” he said. “I would rather watch 10 birds for the rest of my life and really get to know their behaviors really well as opposed to doing 300 birds on my life list. That’s not my goal. Everyone’s got different goals for what they would like to do with birding.”

Kinne will also venture out if he is in search of a specific bird, like the eastern meadowlark in Fayetteville. Not wanting to waste a trip, Kinne uses Cornell’s eBird app to check out the latest reports of when and where birders are recording their bird sightings.

Mobile apps like Cornell’s eBird and Merlin have become useful tools for the birding community. No matter where people are, they have access to data on thousands of birds across the country.

“There’s a lot of people who really aren’t into birding, and then they get really excited because now they have this thing on their smartphone that they can actually hear what these birds are,” Kinne said.

Merlin can be especially useful for Kinne’s class. With a database of over 26,000 audio recordings, his students can practice their skills anywhere at any time. Additionally, through microphones on people’s smartphones, the app’s Sound ID can identify over 1,000 species of birds out in the wild.

Launched in 2014, Cornell’s app registered about 300,000 active users by 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic spawned a surge in birding interest, and the app surpassed 1.5 million by 2023.

While the app has extended the life lists for many birders and provides an introduction to bird songs, Kinne keeps his classes “old school,” as he describes it.

“You need to use your own brain first,” he said. “And then you can use the technology as a backup.” 

Kinne’s students also see his approach as an effective way to build a skill that can take a few years to get good at.

“The key thing Steve says is, ‘When you listen, if you’re out walking, you listen to a bird and you use your characteristics that you learn in the class. Try and narrow it down to a group of birds,’” said Danielle Davignon, who took the beginner class in 2022.

If students still can’t figure out what the species is, Davignon, 44, said her teacher’s advice is simple: Keep listening.

And if that still doesn’t work?

“Go and find the darn bird,” Davignon said.

Kinne’s passion for birding by ear has resonated with his students, who have become just as enthusiastic about the skill.

Davignon is a veterinary school graduate who works as an internal medicine consultant for a diagnostic lab.  Due to her passion for birding, she joined the Onondaga Audubon Society in 2022 once the pandemic began to settle down.

A favorite spot for her close to the Canal is Green Lakes State Park east of Syracuse, a hotspot for local birders.

She got hooked on Kinne’s class thanks to his field trips and his enthusiasm.

“I loved it. I kind of had been trying to teach myself to pay attention to some of the birds in my backyard and listening to their sounds and was just making up things myself to learn them,” Davignon said.

Davignon and her classmate Wendy Kurlowicz slowly developed their bird listening skills since they took the beginner class together. The two friends have since taken Kinne’s advanced course multiple times.

“I didn’t want to watch a PowerPoint. I didn’t want to listen to CDs in the car,” Kurlowicz said. “I missed the group dynamics. I was really excited to know that this was being offered. It was right up my alley of a new technique I wanted to pick up on.”

Kurlowicz, 57, who lives on Syracuse’s westside, said the Canal holds a special place in her heart.

“If I were to say my three top places in the world — the Sims Store Museum has always been number one for me,” she said. “It just holds so many memories. I’ve been walking that section of the Canal since I was in my 20s. But every time I go, I see something notable.”

Along with the red-winged blackbirds and yellow warblers, she sees snakes and painted turtles on the Canal trails.

Kurlowicz enjoyed how Kinne taught different ways to remember bird calls, whether through mnemonics, cadence or making diagrams in one’s head.

This year, Kurlowicz and Davignon took over the beginning course for Kinne. Wanting to step back due to Parkinson’s making hikes tougher, while keeping the course alive, he nudged his two top students to get involved teaching with hopes that they might eventually take over the advanced course.

Kurlowicz can’t wait to pass on the skills that Kinne taught her and Davignon. After recently retiring as Onondaga County’s environmental health community director, the current school nurse is excited to spend more time birding.

“I want to get people excited about really actively listening,” Kurlowicz said. “It changes the way you are when you’re outside or anywhere, instead of being in our head and thinking about my grocery list. I can’t explain how much I really enjoy working on that sense and sharpening that skill.”

On top of teaching the class, Davignon, who now sits on the Onondaga Audubon chapter’s board of directors and also chairs its membership committee, sees the organization helping usher in a new generation of birders.

Of the 96 million birders in 2022, more than 10 million were people between the ages of 16 and 24, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Adam Peruta

Wendy Kurlowicz, Danielle Davignon and Steve Kinne point toward birds they notice along the Erie Canal during a regular birding expedition.

New York State capitalized on this interest with the creation of the New York State Birding Trail in 2021. While not a physical trail, the state’s website identifies locations that are popular for birders. The state has 72 spots listed under the Central New York region. New York lists just under 400 spots across the state.

Several of the locations can be found along the Erie Canal and its tributaries between Buffalo and Albany. Five spots on the map between East Syracuse and Rome are along the Old Erie Canal State Historic Park.

The Onondaga chapter has seen steady membership growth over the past few years and now has more than 2,000 members.

The OAS benefited financially from the wave of interest in birding. Donations grew from about $20,000 in the 2019-20 fiscal year to almost $50,000 in 2023-24. Over 40% of the local members donated money on top of their membership fees. Currently 560 members pay directly to OAS, which allows 100 percent of their dues to stay local.

This year, in coordination with the Audubon on Campus initiative, the Onondaga chapter helped the birding club at SUNY ESF reclassify to become an official Audubon chapter.

“ It was a very laid-back club that wasn’t this big grand thing that we wanted it to be,” ESF club president Anthony Russo said. “We thought that by joining the Audubon on Campus program, we could get more funding to do more things and connect with a wider range of people and organizations that we would have otherwise.”

Russo said the club generally gets about 10 people at its meetings, but typically over 30 people will sign up for outings.

Russo has worked on building his birding-by-ear skills, claiming he can identify anywhere from 90 to 150 birds in North America.

“I like to try and bird by ear as much as I possibly can,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll do it even more than sight birding just because it’s a little bit easier once you start knowing what to listen for.” 

Not only does birding by ear move people away from simply bird-watching, it improves people’s mental health and helps them hone in on their surroundings, Davignon said

Davignon finds birding is a break from the daily information overload. The act of trying to identify bird calls forces her to focus her attention on listening to the song.

“I actually found that it’s kind of a really nice, like, stress relief thing, because I am present,” she said.

Kinne doesn’t expect anyone to recognize bird calls right away. It takes a lot of time, focus and willingness to make mistakes. But for those who persist through the learning process, the payoff is great.

“ Birding is a real sport, if you will. It’s a real challenging activity and especially if you’re going to do both sight and sound,” he said. “It’ll occupy you for years.”