Identifying birds through their song is a great way to know what bird species are around you, especially in spring and summer; it’s a joyous experience to have this skill. Often birders first hear birds rather than see them.
Learning bird song can be achieved through hours of hard graft, going out with another birder “in the know”, or even through listening to recordings available on the Internet. However the Merlin app is a fantastic tool for bird song and call identification and worth downloading to your smartphone; just beware though that it’s not perfect and so can occasionally mislead you by identifying a bird that it thinks its heard, but that would be very unlikely in your location.
But don’t be put off – there are likely to only be a small number of the commoner bird species in your local area to learn (may 10 to 20) at the beginning of your journey and then over time your knowledge will grow.
The RSPB site is good for bird song clips – find a species from the alphabetical list and then click on the associated loud speaker icon to the right of your screen and click on the then the listen shortcut to hear your chosen bird.
Once you can recognise a bird by its song you can quickly tell what species are about, but of course it gives you no clues to the other species which are silent.
The male bird are the singers, with the odd exception where females also sing, e.g. robins in winter. They sing to proclaim their territory and ward off competitors, but they also sing to attract a mate. Different species will sing at differing times of the day. Some sing early at dawn when their food supply is still hard to find and when their songs carry the best, whilst some sing during the night (famously the nightingale) where they are the most noticeable without other noises to distract.
The table below is a starter kit for some of the more likely birds that you may come across, and some some stars of the bird world.
| Bird | Song description | Months when they sing |
| Blackbird | Beautifully fluent, clear and strident song. Phrases not habitually repeated like the song thrush or as fluty as the mistle thrush. Likes to sing from obvious prominentaries such as trees, bushes and roof tops. Common bird in towns and likely to be heard. | FMAMJJ |
| Song Thrush | Repeats its song phrases in pairs almost without exception. Clear and strident song. | JFMAMJ ND |
| Mistle Thrush | Strident song from prominentaries such as the very tops of trees. Seems to like to sing in wild weather and hence has another name of storm cock. | JFMAMJD |
| Great Tit | A bird which likes to make a great many different calls which can be confusing. However its main call which sounds like “tea-cher tea-cher” is very distinctive. It is a good sign of spring coming. | JFMAMJ |
| Green Finch | A drawn out and rasping song accompanied by canary-like twitterings. Usually made form the tops of trees and hence quite distinctive. Greenfinches have been hit hard by a bird disease that has decimated their numbers in recent years. | MAMJJ |
| Dunnock | Undulating warble which resembles a wren. Sings on in small bursts with no easily repeatable tune. | JFMAMJ SOND |
| Robin | Clear and mellow song often heard in autumn as well as spring. Quite often sings at night where there are bright street lights. | JFMAM ASOND |
| Wren | A short whirring, penetrating and undulating trill of a song. The loudness of the song belies the small size of the bird. Sings in bursts from near low cover such as a bush. Similar to a hedge dunnock but faster and more urgent sounding. | FMAMJJA D |
| Skylark | A beautiful golden sustained trilling song usually given on the wing as the bird flutters in mid air. Sings in open farmland locations only. | FMAMJ O |
| Nightingale | Now quite rare but one worth including. The richest and most memorable of all British bird songs. Like a black bird song but richer and even more varied and skilled. A summer migrant that will happily sing during the day but is famous for its night time renditions. Usually sings from deep cover of scrub. | (A)MJ |
| Yellow hammer | Getting rarer unfortunately. A hedgerow bird with a distinctive song that sounds like the phrase “a-little-bit-of- bread-and-no-cheeeeeese” in its pattern. The last note is a drawn out and raspy. | FMAMJJA |