Resources for Visually Impaired
You may be interested in the books and video about listening to bird song on this page from the All About Birds web site:
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/lab/kroodsma
If you want to teach young kids how to recognize bird calls you may be interested in the games this home-schooling family played:
Or you may want to play the Bird ID Quiz on the All About Birds web site. See if you can recognize birds by their call:
All About Birds ID Quiz
Students from Codman Academy Charter Public School (Boston, MA) created a great podcast focused on the songs and calls of city birds.
Urban Birds Podcast created by students at Codman Academy
Perhaps you would like to create a podcast...try using the directions from the Codman Academy Urban Birds team. They documented how they recorded bird sounds and created their podcast:
UBSP Step by Step Instructions
Colleen McLinn, from Cornell Macauley Library of Natural Recordings, presents ideas for educators to lead three sound-related activities:
- Communicating without Words
- Seeing Sounds (using free Raven spectrogram software. She makes suggestions as to how this activity can be modified for BVI people)
- Celebrate Urban Birds sound matching exercise, to get to know the 15 focal species better...by ear!
Download and listen to sounds of many animals and birds from Macauley Library here at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, using free Raven software.
Macaulay Library of Natural Sound
Retired Refuge Manager Steve Bouffard, from Boise, Idaho, led Blind and Visually Impaired visitors on some bird-watching activities. He felt very rewarded by the positive reaction, and wrote up his experiences so others could lead the same activities. "This is one of the most personally rewarding programs that a person can participate in. I lead numerous field trips, but never until I led the first of these VIP trips did anyone say, “Thank You, no one has ever done anything like this for us before”:
How to find a good listening site during your Sound Safari
Steve Bouffard, retired refuge manager from Boise, Idaho
