04/28/2025
With spring in the air, many of our patients are getting back into birding. Attached is a part of an email sent to us by a patient. We created a special "Birding" program in the hearing aids which was very successful. If you have a birding friend, share this post with them. We would be happy to create a birding program for anyone who needs one for their hobby. As our patient reports at the end, "Bird mode really matters!"
"About 2 weeks ago you tweaked the "Birding" mode on my hearing aids based on what you'd learned at a recent conference. I promised then to report back on how these changes worked. Success!
The tweaks you made to the noise suppression eliminated the "ghost" bird song effect, where weak calls from distant birds showed up only as gaps in the background noise. Now they show up as weak songs which I have no trouble identifying. Competing against the Merlin app on my cellphone, I pick up about 5 songs that Merlin misses for everyone that's the other way around. Mostly, we hear the same songs though. I'm also getting a lower error rate than Merlin, judging by the songs identified before I see the bird for confirmation. We're both good, but with these hearing aid tweaks, I'm better.
For what it's worth, I can identify most songbirds out to at least 50 yards and the lower pitched songs well beyond 100 yards. Take the hearing aids out and the world closes way in on me.
Overall, the hearing aids continue to be superb for birding, just a bit better with the tweaks you tried. I would recommend these settings for your other birding patients."
Once again, thanks for going to the effort of designing a really good birding mode for me. At least 90% of the birds I identify I never see. And well less than half of those "heard only" birds would have been detectable without the hearing aids. Even switching back to "normal" mode drops the detection range a lot. Bird mode really matters! I'm outside birding far more because of this capability."
