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Finding Mom's Favorite Bird
How author Becca Rowland learned to recognize birds by the sounds they make.
© Andy Morffew
Author and illustrator Becca Rowland likes to keep an eye out for cardinals. Her mom loves them and is pretty good at finding them, too. Becca didn’t know how she did it, until they realized their mom was birding by ear! Now Becca has written a new book called, Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds They Make.
BirdNote®
Neighborhood Bird Sounds with Becca Rowland
Written by Ariana Remmel
This is BirdNote.
[Northern Cardinal]
Author and illustrator Becca Rowland likes to keep an eye out for cardinals. Her mom loves them and is pretty good at finding them too. Becca didn’t know how she did it, until they realized their mom was birding by ear!
Becca Rowland: She was visiting me one day and a bird was singing in a tree, and her whole body went on alert and she was like, “there is a cardinal!” And she looked around until she could find it. And I realized that I had no idea what a cardinal sounded like. So I made it my mission to learn so that I could then tell my mother that I had found her favorite bird.
At first, Becca looked to field guides for help identifying the songs of her neighborhood birds, like Blue Jays.
[Blue Jay]
But, technical descriptions like harsh, grating, and shrill never quite clicked.
Becca Rowland: But if I told you that it, “if it sounds like a rusty hinge being moved back and forth, that's a Blue Jay”.
[Blue Jay]
They learned to connect new birds with familiar sounds.
Becca Rowland: It had to be a real sound that I could describe to a person and they would know what it is in their head. And it was just my brain's way of making sense of these random noises that I was hearing.
Becca compiled their “hilariously accurate ways to identify birds” in the new book Bird Talk. Now when Becca hears a bird that sounds like a siren going off, she knows to look for her mom’s favorite bird …
[Northern Cardinal]
…the Northern Cardinal.
For BirdNote, I’m Ariana Remmel.
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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Producer: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Ariana Remmel
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Blue Jay ML91010761 recorded by Jocelyn Lauzon. Northern Cardinal ML424928501 recorded by James Remsen.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2026 BirdNote February 2026
Narrator: Ariana Remmel
ID# RowlandB-02-2026-02-09 RowlandB-02
Ariana Remmel
Writer NarratorSights & Sounds
