Earlier this year, I sat down with professional naturalist and Maine guide Dan Gardoqui. He practices a technique, familiar to indigenous people worldwide, called bird language. This practice develops a deeper awareness of the environment than most modern hunters are accustomed to. I wanted to see how being trained in this way had impacted the way he scouts and hunts for deer. Our talk was punctuated by laughter, animal mimicry, and some great stories.
“Bird Language” is About Awareness
Dan: So I Googled you last week and saw that you’re also a vegetarian that became a hunter. That’s my story too!
Elizabeth: Oh, really? How did you get into hunting?
Dan: Growing up, I had a sense that we weren’t taking care of the land [with factory farming]. I didn’t know anything about wild meat, so I went vegetarian. Then when I moved up to New Hampshire for grad school, people were always talking about hunting, and I got curious.
I took a hunter safety course, and I’ll never ever forget it. I raised my hand and said, “What if you don’t have a firearm?” And the whole place turned and looked at me like I had two heads. I think I almost blew out my shoulder from trying so many different guns that day. But as a teenager I got excited about getting close to wildlife, and deer were one of the first animals that I felt a real strong connection to.
“Wherever we go, we create a sphere of disturbance, but then we also have a sphere of awareness. So you want to think about how you can shrink that sphere of disturbance and extend the sphere of awareness beyond it.”
I had a goal to touch a wild deer. I spent months trying to do this. Finally my mentor pointed out that all the birds were alerting the deer to me sneaking up. Thrushes, robins, flickers, jays, there were all sorts of birds that were alarming at my presence. I eventually got to see this at a distance in some fields, and I was like, oh, that’s really happening? The deer are paying attention to the birds? Okay, I have to think about this all differently now.
Elizabeth: That’s a perfect segue into bird language. Birding is pretty common in the United States – the act of identifying birds by sight or sound. But bird language, or the interpretation of the birds’ vocalizations and behaviors, is a pretty lost art. Why do you suppose that is?
Dan: When you go to Africa, or places where there are longer viewscapes and dangerous large carnivores, people tend to pay attention to it more and have more of a language for it. The first time I ever went to Botswana, those guides were so tuned in, and I would ask them questions about the different birds and how they learned all that. They said everyone knows this. If you didn’t know this, you wouldn’t keep your clients alive.
They know that when that starling hops up on top of the mound made by that burrowing creature and makes that ch-ch kind of noise and points down there’s probably some sort of large burrowing snake there, versus when it goes up 15 feet in the tree and makes a tree-tree noise. That tells you there’s a band of mongooses coming. And these guys are reading this at 30 or 40 kilometers an hour, zipping down a dirt road and just seeing it out of the corner of their eye.
It’s really basic in places where there’s a need and also with landscapes where there’s a lot more visibility and we can actually make deductions. We can talk about correlation and we can see causation. But in this part of this world, we hear the jays going sneak! sneak! sneak! and it’s like, what the hell are they doing that for? And you can’t see because there’s all this vegetation between you. But sometimes they’re doing that because a deer just winded you and it’s now sneaking away.
Elizabeth: Yeah, you might not be able to see it in the moment, which can be frustrating, but the tracks will prove it. So bird language is still learnable in any environment.
Dan: Yeah, nature is always teaching, as long as you’re paying attention. You just have to be in more of a receiving mode than a transmitting mode. You have to really listen. The knowledge of bird language is rare in some ways, but it’s also one of the oldest skills on earth, and it’s still in use in some places, just not in the mainstream hunting kind of lingo.
Elizabeth: So talk some more about bird language.
Dan: Well, it isn’t just listening to the sounds of birds. It’s tuning into patterns. Noticing what’s normal. What’s baseline, what’s out of the baseline, you know? I was just fortunate to meet people when I was much younger that put language to this. And I worked for a long time helping put language to this. My mentor, Jon Young, and I put together a book called What the Robin Knows, which talks about how animals reveal the secrets of nature. We focus on birds and how they can tell you the difference between a fast-moving ground predator, a slow-stalking ground predator, a fast-moving aerial predator, a stationary aerial predator, etc.
Elizabeth: That was the first time bird language was ever put into book form, right?
Dan: Yeah, at first some people think it’s a little out there, but my job in that book was to actually do all the science editing. There’s plenty of research to back it up. There wasn’t as much then. Now there’s way more. Birds have a complex language. How would they have survived for millions of years on this planet if they didn’t?
Stalking a Buck Successfully
Elizabeth: Do you have any good stories that would illustrate bird language in a deer hunting situation?
Dan: Oh yeah. I can count on one hand the number of bucks I’ve been able to sneak up on in their bed during hunting season. It’s very unusual for me. But I do remember one day… my property backs up to 6,000 acres. I’m super lucky. I can walk out my back door and hunt.
One day I decided to cross the swamp because the wind was out of the east. I had on some muck boots, and I’m trying to walk slow enough that I wasn’t splashing. I’m walking, stopping, listening, smelling. And on the edge of the swamp, I see some water on top of the leaves that looked pretty fresh. It was a pretty sunny day, probably in the 40s.
I used to get really anal about trying to understand exactly how old a track was. But then when I hung out with a bunch of traditional trackers from Southern Africa, their translator broke down their aging classification into three things: old, meaning don’t even bother; fresh – meaning whoa, that’s interesting; and very fresh, which means we can go get that right now.
This felt very fresh to me. I just stopped for a minute and listened to the birds. But it’s midday now and I’m not expecting much. It’s fall. You might get some jays or crows or chickadees moving through in little early winter flocks, but they’ll usually just tell you about stuff like an owl that’s trying to get a nap.
They’d help me during fall turkey season for sure. When turkeys seize up and they get a little nervous, and they do that putt-putt-putt-putt, sometimes the chickadees will feel that and respond to that. But with deer they’re not usually as useful.
So I’m listening, and then off to my left, I hear these doves take off really fast, and I see them flying up on an angle, pretty high and far. Then all of a sudden, there’s a coyote coming down this old four-wheeler trail. And I thought, okay, he probably spooked those doves. This trail where I’m seeing the coyote is maybe 75 to 100 yards from me. I’m pretty well covered and I’ve got the wind in my favor, but he’s on this trail I’m trying to get to.
It’s a little loud underfoot, so I don’t move. I just let the coyote leave, but at one point it stops and starts sniffing, and now I’m thinking about the drips in front of me. Maybe this coyote is on to something. It turns to go into the woods but then freezes, quickly turns around, and gallops back to where it came from.
So I’m looking at these drip tracks and all of a sudden I see fresh browse on the maples. Then I see a really nice compression track that’s hard-edged and really casting a shadow – that angled hard hoof of a deer. And then I see a rub that still has a tinge of green.
And I was like, oh boy. Cause you know, they oxidize so fast and get that orangey reddish color. This still had green in it. So now my heart starts pumping and I’m checking everything’s all set on my rifle. I stalk to that trail where the coyote was. And sure enough, right where it sniffed, there’s a line of deer droppings. This deer could be anywhere. It could be bedded just out of sight.
I’m moving real slow, really scanning the landscape. And I come over this one hill and all of a sudden, I hear sneak! sneak! and this bluejay lands right above me. And it just starts pointing at me and it’s saying sneak! sneak! But then I think, don’t look at the bluejay, look ahead in case anything alerts. And at that same moment, I see a head turn back toward me, and there’s a buck bedded 40 yards from me who just came out of a little slumber. He doesn’t know what the jay is upset about. We’re in a lockdown.
I’m slowly turning off my safety and I’m trying to figure out where I can rest this rifle. Can I get down on one knee? The jay stopped screaming. I could feel a tension in my body release. The deer goes to lay back down and I’m thinking it’s faking me out. And sure enough, boom! Turns its head right back, looks right at me. I’m waiting. It goes back down, and I decide I’m dropping down low. I start creeping forward where I can peek over the hill and rest on this mossy spot. As I come over the crest, I see it looking right at me.
But lucky for me, it didn’t bolt out of its bed. It just stood up for a second and gave me a nice quartering shot. So I took that shot and dropped that deer right there, only to feel my heart right in my throat for a second. That whole hunt was maybe 25 minutes from door to dead.
Spheres of Awareness and Disturbance
Elizabeth: Wow, there are a lot of layers to that story. Multiple animal species – doves, coyote, deer, bluejay. Tracks, browse, rubs, scat. Sound, movement, stillness. Wind, weather, topography. Even just the awareness of what isn’t happening and whether that’s normal or not. It’s such a multi-dimensional way to hunt.
Dan: Yeah it was pretty wild. Multiple species interactions plus me, because as hunters, we are part of the story. We are another species on the landscape that they are paying attention to and talking about.
Elizabeth: Yeah, the bluejays are always super obvious, but a lot of the other more subtle birds are saying things too. You have to really be listening – and know what to listen for – to pick up on that. And we’re calling it bird language, but we include other animals like chipmunks and squirrels and things. It’s just that birds are usually more abundant and doing most of the talking.
“Animals are paying attention to us because we have a long history of eating them.”
Dan: Yeah, animals are in constant communication. They listen to each other. And even though a few modern scientists will challenge it, people have known this for eons. You can go anywhere around the world and talk to anyone in any traditional culture. Animals talk to animals. Animals listen to animals. They’re paying attention. They have to. And on that day, my timing was right, and I was paying attention too.
Now, most of the time I hear a bird alarming because there’s a buck sneaking away from me, or there’s a doe stomping on the other side of somewhere I can’t see, and it spooks up a robin in the swamp, eating the winter berries, or a hermit thrush might do its reeeeeee call when it gets a little crabby at something near it.
We get busted by deer all the time, but we just don’t know it because we don’t get the visual feedback. The challenging thing about hunting in a dense landscape is we can’t see and we don’t understand what we just did wrong. But when we hunt with bird language, we’re getting that feedback. The birds tell us what is moving and where. It helps us slow down, be quieter. Most animals have multiple calls with multiple purposes, but a lot of people don’t know it.
Elizabeth: What can people do to get started hunting this way, aside from signing up for one of your workshops?
Dan: Get to know one place really well if you can, in all the seasons, all the weather, in all conditions. Get to know it in the dark, in the cold, in the wet. Yeah, you’re going to be uncomfortable, but you’re going to know that place better and you’re going to know those deer better.
of birds to identify where hidden animals are moving on the landscape.
And just remember that you’ve always been a hunter. All of your people, no matter where you’re from on this planet, at some point in time were hunters. We’ve still got it in our DNA and you don’t need to spend a boatload of money to do it.
Trying other outdoor activities can also be really helpful. Go take some birding classes. Get more used to using your binoculars to quickly find what you’re hearing. Pick up hobbies that are going to broaden your understanding of the deer’s world. Wild foods foraging – get to know your plants. What does a deer like to eat this time of year? What does it like to bed under? If you really want to know the deer better, you have to know the deer’s world better.
So there’s that prep side. But the other stuff is more internal. Slow the hell down in your movement and in your brain. Shut that little story off. We have to be present to what’s around us.
As hunters, we’re always tracking, right? Like, oh, was that rub here last week? Or is that a new scrape? But I would also encourage everyone to track their own internal landscape: our mood, our intentions. Animals can often read intentions, so part of our camouflage is the way we are carrying ourselves, what we’re projecting. Those kinds of things can be just as important as, you know, walking quietly.
Elizabeth: I’ve definitely experienced that. And there are these concentric rings of effect. In some cases, when I was really putting in the effort, animals that I’ve never had close encounters with just came right up to me. But also if you gain the trust of the birds, they won’t alert your presence to other animals. We’ve all heard the phrase “read the room” regarding how you should act around people. This is the same thing, but for the wilderness. There are rules, and if you don’t know how to be respectful, you really stand out in the wrong way.
Dan: Yeah. Wherever we go, we create a sphere of disturbance, but then we also have a sphere of awareness. So you want to think about how you can shrink that sphere of disturbance and extend the sphere of awareness beyond it.
A primary disturbance is when you walk in the woods, come around the corner, and surprise a deer that didn’t hear you. But if you come around the corner and there’s a squirrel and it hops up on a tree and starts alarming at you, and then that buck that was coming just beds down and stops, that’s a secondary alarm or disturbance. Animals are paying attention to us because we have a long history of eating them.
Elizabeth: Sometimes I encounter people who think bird language is an impossibility or the tales of it are exaggerated.
Dan: Sometimes it’s our own human arrogance, and I’m sure I’m guilty of it too. We just forget. We think if things aren’t like us, they’re not as smart as us, but anyone who might be reading your article later should know, if they spend time in the wild, they’ve been bested many times. We’ve been schooled, we’ve been humbled, and we continually will be because for these animals, it’s life and death.
To learn more about Dan’s work, visit www.leadwithnature.com.