More confidence with distinguishing between calls and subsongs might take my winter and spring birding to the next level, and I’m optimistic that the ability to learn less obvious calls is something many of us could get better at if only we had a good programme to work through and some targeted learning materials.

As an educator, I’m fascinated by what works and what doesn’t in learning, and have enjoyed devising programmes, lessons and workshops for a wide range of topics, from how to improve your observational drawing and creative writing, to how to identify common pavement plants or urban birds.

I’ve looked around for something off the shelf I could use to get better at identifying bird calls and subsongs, but can’t find anything which quite does the job for me. So I’m going to have a go at devising something. The initial approach – which I plan to amend if necessary when I and others test it – is made up of 4 steps as follows:

Step 1 – Describe. For each of the focus species, I’ll find clear recordings of calls from credible free resources available online. Then I’ll have a go describing the call phonetically and compare my description with those in my Collins Bird Guide and my WildGuides British Birds to check the subtleties. Where I can, I’ll look at the spectrograms of the calls too.

Step 2 – Mimic. I’ll listen again and practise mimicking the call and, when I think I can remember one, I’ll check it against the recording. I’ll be particularly thinking about pitch, pattern and sound quality.

Step 3 – Isolate. It’s rare that your target species is calling in an otherwise quiet habitat, so I’ll listen to a range of unedited recordings made in the field in the British Isles and practise isolating my target calls from other sounds captured.

Step 4 – Revise and Test. Ideally I’ll have some recordings I can shuffle and test myself on. Failing that, I’ll recruit my very kind and generous husband to test me on the week’s target species.