If you have trouble picking up or focusing on faint sounds, you can use an easy technique to boost your listening powers: just cup your hands behind your ears and push them forward slightly with your thumbs and index fingers. In effect, you're giving yourself bigger sound catchers. You'll be surprised how much more you can hear. Go ahead - try it now. Better yet, go outdoors and listen to a bird without your "new" ears, and then with them. The method is especially handy for pinpointing the direction from which a sound is coming - it's like adding a zoom lens to your ears.

The real art in woods-listening is not so much hearing sounds as it is identifying them. That loud rustling in the leaves - is it a scampering squirrel, or simply a brown thrasher living up to its name? That sharp snap of cracking wood - a twig surrendering to the weight of an approaching deer, or just a brittle branch giving in the wind? In the forest, even silence - a sudden stillness, perhaps caused by the passing of a predator - tells tales.

Most of us already command a considerable, if under used, vocabulary of nature sounds. Some birds' utterances identify themselves - the whippoorwill's repeated namesake call, the chickadee's chick-a-dee-dee-dee, the crow's caw, the bubbling gobl gobl gobl of a wild tom turkey. Then there are sounds familiar from our back yards - the cardinal's purdy-purdy-purdy, or the robin's whistling cheerup-cheery-cheerio-cheerup. Other sounds are specific of one's home region. West Virginians know the raccoons chirp or the snort of a deer as it warns you to stay away.

Some sounds require no learning at all - you don't need to have heard a rattlesnake's harsh rattle, a cougar's throaty growl, or the no-nonsense gruff huff huff of a rankled black bear to get the message loud and clear.

But more often than not, the sounds you hear outdoors are of a subtler sort. That small, barely visible bird making a quick, rolling tap-tap-tapping high in a tree: it's a woodpecker drumming to attract a mate, yes, but is it a downy, or a hairy? (Downy woodpeckers drum rapidly, about 15 times a second - but hairy woodpecker's drum even faster, at about 25 times a second.)

That howl in the darkness - is it a dog, or a coyote? (Coyotes possess a distinctly higher-pitched voice than most dogs, and usually add yips and yaps.) In spring's nightly frog chorus at the pond, the bullfrogs singing bass are obvious enough - but who are all those baritones and tenors, and which species are calling out which tunes? Just what kinds of insects are buzzing, humming and rasping in complex rhythms on a summer's eve?

Chances are you'll never need, or want, to put names to every individual song maker you hear in the outdoors. There are, after all, nearly 70 species of "true" and "false" katydids in the United States and Canada, more than 40 species of ground and tree crickets and dozens of other sound-producing members of the insect family alone. And there are equally vast and confusing orchestras of birds, mammals, amphibians and others. But listening carefully to nature's sounds - and learning at least some of the identities behind them - can help you distinguish one sound from another, giving you a greater appreciation not only for specific songs but also for the astonishing depth and variety of our planet's vast auditory repertoire.

Although books and other aids may be able to help, there's no substitute for firsthand experience when it comes to nature appreciation. It's not just an ability to identify sounds, but also an understanding of their meanings. In the southern Appalachians, old-timers searching the backwoods for medicinal ginseng knew to follow the maniacal call of the "sang bird:" the pileated woodpecker, which once kept mostly to the rich, shaded cove habitat favored by that plant. Birdwatchers seeking day-roosting owls listen for the excited caws of mobbing crows, a good sign that the birds will be circling an owl (or hawk) squatting in a tree in their territory.

Only time and experience can give you the discriminating ear of the true woods person. It is a learning process, a listening process, a learning-some-more process. And there's no time like now to sit down, stay still, and perk up your ears.

Only time and experience can give you the discriminating ear of the true woods person. It is a learning process, a listening process, a learning-some-more process. And there’s no time like now to sit down, stay still, and perk up your ears. There are also electronic devices to help you to learn bird sounds: http://www.whatbird.com/store/p-492-birdsong-identiflyer-green.aspx

Sound learning sites:

1)      http://www.learnbirdsongs.com/

2)      http://www.virtualbirder.com/vbirder/matcher/matcherDirs/SONG/

3)      http://www.enature.com/birding/audio.asp

4)      http://allaboutfrogs.org/weird/general/songs.html

5)      http://www.naturenorth.com/spring/sound/shfrsnd.html

6)      http://www.junglewalk.com/sound/animal-sounds.htm

7)      http://www.naturesongs.com/insects.html