A Personal Ray of Hope

Hear! Hear!

(Listen to the radio version here.)

When I started birding as a 23-year-old, my eyes were pretty good at picking out birds, and they kept getting better with experience, but my ears were exceptionally good from the start, especially at picking out songs in high frequencies. I didn’t yet recognize many of them, but I could easily hear them, and so the learning process was fast. In groups, I was almost invariably the first one to call out kinglets, creepers, Cedar Waxwings, LeConte’s Sparrows, and Blackburnian Warblers.

Now, as a 73-year-old, my eyes are even better than when I started out thanks to cataract surgery.

In the two weeks between cataract surgeries on my eyes, I used Photoshop to show how the exact same photo looked through my right eye with the new lens and my old, cataract-ridden left eye. My cataracts were congenital, and I don’t know that I’d ever seen true blue before the procedure.

Unfortunately, my hearing is shot. I figured out, long after the fact, that I lost most of my high-frequency hearing at Universal Studios in Orlando on Halloween Horror Night 2006, all because I forgot to bring earplugs. My ears were ringing for hours. The next spring was the first time I did not hear a single LeConte’s Sparrow in my mother-in-law’s field, but I assumed their numbers must be down.

I was victim of an all-too-human tendency to assume that the world we experience through our own senses is the reality, never imagining that our senses could be missing basic things. When we start losing our hearing, it’s not like someone’s suddenly turned the volume control down. Most of us lose high frequencies even as most frequencies sound the same as always, which is why we suddenly start thinking people are mumbling—vowel sounds are produced at lower, more audible frequencies than consonant sounds. It’s our losing consonant frequencies that makes speech less understandable.

Anyway, I got hearing aids in March 2015, exactly 10 years ago. They made a huge difference but can’t produce miracles. With them, I could hear very close LeConte’s Sparrows, but still could not hear them at any distance without using Lang Elliott’s wonderful, free Hear Birds Again app, which lowers the frequencies of just the high-frequency sounds, making high-pitched bird vocalizations sound a bit weird but very audible. Lang Elliott’s hearbirdsagain.org website shows how to make inexpensive binaural headphones to plug into the phone so we can not only hear those high-pitched birds—we can also get the direction the sounds are coming from.

Now I use Cornell’s Merlin app to tell me if LeConte’s Sparrows are singing, and if they are, the headphones plugged into Lang Elliott’s app show me where they are to take their pictures.

I was due for an audiology appointment when the pandemic kicked in but couldn’t risk exposing my pregnant daughter and then baby Walter to Covid. My hearing was getting noticeably worse, but my hearing aids still helped. Then, right when I was dealing with breast cancer last year, the wire on one of my hearing aids broke. At that point, hearing LeConte’s Sparrows was the least of my worries.

But I’m healthy again, and getting back into my groove. I was invited on a birding trip in May to Guyana, in South America. To make the most of that I need hearing aids again. For Christmas, my daughter and son-in-law gave us a membership at Costco, the most affordable place to buy high-tech hearing aids. Costco gives a basic hearing test, but not by a certified audiologist. I tried to make an appointment with my audiologist, but she didn’t have an opening until autumn, and the soonest I could get in to see anyone at my clinic would be months away. So I looked up audiologists at the other Duluth clinic and called to make an appointment with Dr. Chad Kittleson. I went in on Thursday, armed with a spectrograph of LeConte’s Sparrow’s song, which tops out just above 10,000 Hz.

I also brought my 10-year-old, broken hearing aids so he could at least see from the programming what my hearing had been five years ago.

Dr. Kittleson’s had several birders as patients and completely understood the issues. He administered the regular hearing tests and also one specifically testing for high frequencies, and as I could tell, my hearing has degenerated significantly, especially in my right ear. Ten years ago, my audiologist told me she wouldn’t have recommended hearing aids yet for a person with my level of hearing loss if I didn’t need those high frequencies as a birder. Now I’m at the point where I need hearing aids for everyday life, too.

My 10-year-old hearing aids were Phonak Audéo V90s. Dr. Kittleson said he often recommends Phonaks, but there are a couple of other brands he now prefers specifically for birding. I was game to try anything, but instead, a miracle happened—he took my hearing aids in another room and came back with them fixed and programmed to my new hearing situation. WHOA! He said if there are issues, we can look at getting new ones, but that these should be good for two or three years at least. Isn’t that amazing?

So suddenly my ears will again be able to pick up the sounds of many spring warblers, South American birds, and maybe even some of my dear LeConte’s Sparrows. I’m not getting any younger and the world is growing darker on many fronts, but I’ll take hope and joy where and whenever I can find it.

I can still hear Cuban Todies when they are pretty close without my hearing aids, but I was more dependent on our guides and other birders to detect them on this trip to Cuba than I was in 2016.