I stopped by a gate one morning in early May because there was so much noise coming out of the hedge that it seemed rude to keep walking. Something was going off at high speed in the thick part near the base, something else was doing a repeated two note thing from the top, and there was a bird sitting on the wire above the gate making a sound like a squeaky hinge. I stood there for about four minutes and could not have told you the name of any of them.
I had been walking that lane for two years at that point. That was the morning it started to bother me.
The morning I realised I could not name anything
What actually got to me was not ignorance in general. It was that I clearly had been hearing these birds for two years and had filed the whole thing under background. I had noticed weather, mud, gates, the state of the crops, and I had somehow not noticed the loudest thing on the walk.
My first instinct was to fix it by volume. I got a field guide out of the library, sat down with it, and gave up in about half an hour. There were far too many small brown birds and the book was organised by taxonomy, which is useless when you are standing at a gate with a bird doing something in front of you for four seconds.
I started with three, not thirty
The thing that actually worked was picking three birds and refusing to care about anything else for a while. I chose them badly at first, going for whatever looked interesting in the book, then swapped to a much better rule: pick the three you encounter most often on your own route.
For my lane that meant the ones in the hedge, the one that sits on top of the hedge and sings for ages, and the big obvious one in the field. Once I could reliably name three, the fourth was much easier, because I could think in terms of not that one and slightly bigger. Identification is mostly comparison, and you cannot compare against nothing.
The mistake I made and would warn anyone off is trying to learn a bird from a photograph and then meet it in the field. Photographs show you a bird holding still in good light at a flattering angle. What you actually get is a shape moving through twigs. Learning the shape and the movement did more for me than learning the plumage.
Sound arrives before sight
Nearly everything I now notice, I hear first. That was a genuine shift. When I started paying attention I realised I could tell that something had changed in the hedge before I could see anything at all, and that a lot of birds announce themselves from cover and never come out.
The practical version of this is that I stop more. Not for long, thirty seconds at a gate or a gap, standing still with my hands down. Birds settle after a surprisingly short pause. The other habit is walking a bit quieter on the last stretch before a spot where I know there is usually activity, which mostly means not scuffing my feet on stones.
I want to be careful here not to overclaim. I am not good at this. I can confidently name a handful by sound and I get plenty of them wrong. The point is that going from zero to a handful changed a walk far more than going from a handful to an expert would.
The hedgerow is a corridor, not a wall
The other thing that fell into place was structure. I had thought of a hedge as a boundary, a line marking where one field stops. Watching birds made it obvious it is a route. Things move along it. A bird will work down a hedge in short hops rather than crossing open ground, and if you follow a hedge line with your eyes you often see the same individual again forty yards on.
That also explains why some hedges are busy and some are almost empty. The busy ones on my patch are thick at the base, have some height, and have a rough grassy margin beside them that has not been cut tight. The empty ones are the neatly trimmed ones with plough right up to the roots. I do not think that is a controversial observation, and you can see it from a lane without knowing anything.
Once you notice the corridor idea, gaps become interesting too. A gap where a hedge has been broken for a gateway is a place where things cross, and it is often where I see the most in the least time.
The app helped and also got in the way
I used a phone app that listens and suggests what it is hearing, and I will not pretend it was not useful. It got me over the initial hump where everything sounds the same, and it gave me names to attach to sounds I already half knew.
Two problems, though. The first is that it is confident and it is not always right, especially in wind or with several birds going at once. I took a couple of its suggestions as fact early on and built a wrong association that took a while to unpick. Now I treat a suggestion as a hint to check rather than an answer.
The second problem is more annoying and more human. Once I had the app, I stopped listening and started operating a phone. I would hear something, get the phone out, watch a screen, and the actual moment would pass. Now I try to listen first, make a guess out loud, and only then check. Guessing before you check is what makes it stick.
What noticing did to the walk itself
The odd result of all this is that my walks got slower and better at the same time. I stop at gates now. I have a couple of places on my loop where I know there is usually something and I plan a pause into them rather than treating a pause as lost time.
It also gave me a sense of season that mud and temperature never quite did. The hedge in February and the hedge in May are not the same place, and I only know that because I stood still long enough to hear the difference. I still cannot name most of what I hear. I just no longer walk past it.