This is Bird Note.

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.

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. But technical descriptions like harsh, grating and shrill, never quite

clicked. But if I told you that if it sounds like a rusty hinge being moved back and forth, that's a blue jay.

They learned to connect new birds with familiar sounds.

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.

The Northern Cardinal.

For Bird, I'm Ariana Rimmel.