A note before you begin.

This page is big yellow letters on black on purpose. That is what my eyes can read best, and many people with poor eyesight find the same. The lines are short, there is no small print, and there are almost no pictures. If your eyes are good, I hope you will forgive the shouting.

Birding by Ear

My name is William Hoyer. I am 86 years old. I live in Grand Island, Nebraska.

I worked forty-one years for the railroad, most of them as a depot agent. I sold tickets, sent telegrams, and kept the waybills straight.

My wife Ruth and I were married fifty-four years. She died in 1991. She was a better birder than I was, though I never told her so. I suppose I am telling her now.

I kept a list of every bird I saw for sixty years. It is in a green ledger book on the kitchen shelf.

Then my eyes went. Now I bird by ear. This page is about how that happened, what helps, and the birds I still know.

Forty Birds I Know by Song

How this page was made

I cannot see a computer screen the way you do. I use a program called ZoomText. It makes everything on the screen very large, and it reads the words out loud to me in a voice my granddaughter calls "the robot."

My granddaughter Tara Hendon set up the computer and the page for me. She comes on Sunday afternoons. I tell her what to write and she shows me how to fix it. The mistakes are mine. The colors were her idea.

What happened to my eyes

In the spring of 1993 I was on the back porch with my field glasses. A Baltimore oriole was in the cottonwood. I could see its wings but not its face. Where its head should have been there was a gray smudge.

I thought my glasses were dirty. They were not.

My eye doctor told me I had age-related macular degeneration, the dry kind, in both eyes. Over the next few years the smudge grew. Now I cannot read a newspaper, see a face across the table, or find a bird in a tree.

But I am not blind. My side vision is still good. I can walk to the corner. I can see the sky. I just cannot see what I look straight at.

What macular degeneration is

I am not a doctor. This is what my doctors taught me. Please ask yours.

At the back of your eye is the retina. In the middle of the retina is a small spot called the macula. The macula gives you sharp, straight-ahead sight. You use it to read, to drive, to thread a needle, and to see faces.

In macular degeneration, the macula breaks down. The center of your sight gets blurry or dark. Your side vision usually stays.

It is the most common cause of poor eyesight among older people in this country.

There are two kinds.

The dry kind is the most common. It usually gets worse slowly, over years. As of now there is no treatment for it. There is a large government study going on about vitamins. Nobody knows the answer yet. Ask your eye doctor.

The wet kind is less common but can get worse fast. Tiny blood vessels grow under the macula and leak. For some people with the wet kind, a laser treatment can help slow the damage, if it is caught early.

So this is the most important thing on my page:

The Amsler grid

Your eye doctor can give you a card called an Amsler grid. It is a square of straight lines with a dot in the middle. You check it at home, often.

Here is how:

1. Wear your reading glasses.
2. Hold the grid at reading distance.
3. Cover one eye.
4. Look only at the dot.
5. Do any lines look wavy, broken or missing? Is any part dark or blurry?
6. Then do the other eye.

Tara made one below out of a table. A computer screen is not as good as the card from your doctor. Get the real one. But this will show you what it looks like.

I keep my card on the refrigerator door with a magnet shaped like a pheasant.

What helps me

A low-vision clinic. My eye doctor sent me to one. They tested what sight I have left and taught me to use it. They showed me how to look a little to the side of things, so my good side vision does the work. I wish I had gone sooner.

A closed-circuit TV magnifier. This is a camera on a stand pointed down at a tray, hooked to a television screen. I put my mail on the tray and it shows up on the screen as big as I like, yellow letters on black. I read my bills, my letters, and my old bird books with it. It cost a good deal. It was worth it.

ZoomText on the computer, which I told you about.

Talking books. The Library of Congress lends free books on tape to people who cannot read regular print. They lend you the special player too. The tapes come and go by mail at no charge. I have listened to more books in five years than I read in the fifty before. Ask your public library or your state library how to sign up.

A talking clock. I press the button and a lady tells me the time. She is very patient with me at three in the morning.

Good light. Bright lamps, aimed at what I am doing, not in my eyes. A lamp by every chair.

Bold markers and big print. Black felt-tip pens. A big-button telephone. A calendar with numbers as big as my hand.

Friends. My friend Arthur McCray drives me to church, to the grocery store, and to the river. More about the river below.

If you use a computer, or want to, there is a fine page called Speaking Terms. It is by a blind computer teacher in San Jose who explains screen readers and the other machines that make a computer talk. She teaches classes for people who are blind or losing their sight, and many of her students are my age.

Learning to bird by ear

After my eyes went, I put the field glasses in a drawer and did not take them out. For a year I sulked. Ruth would have been ashamed of me.

One morning in May, sitting on the back porch, I heard a house wren going on and on in the lilac. And I knew it was a house wren. I did not need to see it. Then a robin. Then a mourning dove. Then the Baltimore oriole in the cottonwood, the same as the morning the gray smudge came.

I had been listening to birds for sixty years without noticing that I knew them by their voices. So I started a new list, in big black marker, of the birds I hear.

That list is now on its own page: Forty Birds I Know by Song. I describe each one in my own words, the way I would tell you if you were sitting on the porch with me.

My hearing is not what it was either. The highest, thinnest songs are gone for me now. I miss the waxwings. But I still have plenty.

The cranes

Every March, something like half a million sandhill cranes come to the Platte River here in central Nebraska. They stop for a few weeks on their way north, resting on the sandbars at night and feeding in the cornfields in the day.

Arthur picks me up before dawn. We sit by the river in the cold with a thermos of coffee. I cannot see the cranes anymore. I do not need to.

Before the sun comes up, the sound starts. Thousands and thousands of cranes calling at once, a rolling, rattling, trumpeting sound that fills up the whole sky. When they lift off the river all together, you can hear the wings.

Ruth and I went every March for fifty years. I still go. I expect I will go as long as Arthur can drive and I can sit on a cold bench.

If you have never heard it, come to Nebraska in March. Bring a warm coat and keep quiet.