This blind Yukon birder learned to use his ears — now hearing loss means every spring is quieter

For the past decade, each spring has been a little more quiet to Brian Lendrum.

The 76-year-old birder likes to stand outside his home on the shores of Lake Laberge, north of Whitehorse, and record the calls and songs around his property. Then he listens back — and hears birds he missed while standing there.

Lendrum, who is blind, spent decades learning to locate and identify birds by sound. But now, he said, as he ages his hearing is “just very, very gradually going down every year.”

He first began to take notice of the avian soundtrack when he moved from Whitehorse to his more rural Lake Laberge home about 40 years ago.

“I have been blind since infancy,” he said. “So naturally I pay attention to my ears all the time.”

Every spring, after the quiet winter months, Lendrum looks forward to hearing birds again, singing to stake out their territories, attract mates and seek out food.

Birds are a part of nature that can be experienced and appreciated without sight. They sing, they call, they announce themselves. Lendrum has spent decades learning to connect with that world using his ears alone.

In the 1980s, Dave Mossop, a veteran Yukon ornithologist, made Lendrum a cassette of bird recordings drawn from the Peterson Guide to Western Birds — curated down to the roughly 250 species typically found in the Yukon.

Lendrum said he would hear a bird around his home, embed the sound in his memory, and then play the cassette to identify it.

“Sometimes I ask somebody, ‘is it possible that I heard a Say’s phoebe?’ And they would say, ‘oh yes, yes. They’re quite common around here.’ … And so then, I would do that over and over and over again.”

Along with the tapes that helped him hear and identify birds, Lendrum says that for the past two decades his wife has been his eyes. Her parents were quite interested in birds, and she picked up on that, he said. 

“We became kind of a team and I would often be saying, ‘oh, can you see what I hear?’” Lendrum said.

Birds perform, Lendrum said, and that is what drew him in. He compares their sounds to other Yukon creatures — foxes, coyotes, lynx — which are relatively silent, along with the plants and trees.

“The birds have this wonderful thing that they sing to attract a mate and they make calls to communicate with each other. It’s just one part of nature that I can really feel like I’m in contact with the natural world,” he said.

The sounds of birds make him happy, he said.

“I just enjoy hearing them because I like to know that they’re here sharing this space with me.”

Lendrum said he can listen to the song of the Swainson’s thrush all day. Another bird that has a beautiful call is the upland sandpiper, he said.

“It just seems so pure and otherworldly.”

An accessible hobby

Lendrum said throughout his journey discovering the world of birds, technology has been his lifeline — from cassettes to CDs, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, and now the Merlin app on his iPhone.

“I have lots of tricks.”

He said his phone app can hear bird songs that he missed until he listens back.

“I hear birds on the recording that I did not hear when I was standing there and listening. That’s kind of strange,” he said. “I say that Merlin has better ears than I do.”

Nicola Lazeo-Fairman, a Whitehorse resident and bird enthusiast, said technology helps people with disabilities enjoy nature and makes hobbies such as birding more accessible.

Unlike with many Yukon activities — mountaineering, tracking wolverines deep in the bush — birds come to you, said Lazeo-Fairman, who is a 29 and uses a power wheelchair. They show up in backyards, along city trails, or at feeders, she said.

Still, her wheelchair has helped her go further afield looking for birds, around the community and on trails.

“It’s great that it’s accessible now to go to more places,” she said. 

Cameron Eckert, director of the Yukon Bird Club, said while technology is making birding more accessible, there are still barriers for some people who want to take up the hobby including things like trail conditions and facilities.

But there are still ways to bird even with mobility challenges, he said.

“We call it a ‘big sit’ – birding from one spot for an hour to see how many species of birds we can spot from a single location,” he said.

Tuning his hearing aids just right

Lendrum said he and his wife don’t go looking for birds, they wait for birds to come to them.

“That has always been my approach,” he said. “I want to know this place in all its diversity, you know, and all the birds that come eventually I will hear them.”

It’s not clear how long he’ll be able to keep doing that. His hearing gradually failing, Lendrum admits he can no longer “hear the birds very well at all.”

He can hear the loud birds like magpies, ravens and seagulls, he said. But smaller songbirds such as the mountain bluebird and hermit thrush are more difficult to pick out.

“I have to tune my hearing aids just exactly right to pick them up … Maybe they are still here and I just can’t hear them. Or maybe they’re not coming anymore.”

Lendrum says he is grateful for the years when birds were his constant companions as he worked in his garden or went about his life.

These days, when he lies on his couch at the end of a long day and closes his eyes, the song that comes to his mind in the quietness is of the Swainson’s thrush.

“To me, they are synonymous with summer,” he said. “It’s a warm sound and it’s a warm time of year.”