During dusk, if you are in a field, you might be able to hear a bird’s wingbeats just before it flies over you. Knowing how to isolate sounds made by wing beats can help in identifying birds even without visual contact. These sounds are a big part of making it possible to identify birds simply by hearing them fly.

The species in this list can be recognized by the sound of their wings rather than by their vocal calls or songs. Each description focuses on the anatomy of the bird responsible for producing the sound, and provides a field-related tip associated with that sound.

1) Common Nighthawk: A Rasping Whir in the Dark

The Common Nighthawk makes a sound that is low and raspy and can be heard before its silhouette is fully visible. It has long wings with pointed primary feathers, which during cruising flight can produce a sound similar to a mosquito. Not all bird sounds are songs or calls; this is an example of feather physics.

Nighthawks have a very special and distinct flying pattern that includes odd, buoyant movements that create a rasping noise that can be heard from quite a distance. As dusk falls during their period of migration, that sound will be heard above warm, soft pavement, which attracts flying insects. If you see a slender silhouette of a Nighthawk with a white throat patch or wing bar and hear that sound, you will identify the bird as a Nighthawk.

2) Ruby-throated Hummingbird: The Familiar Hum Up Close

The high-pitched sound made by male hummingbirds is well known, caused by 50-60 wing beats per second. What is less known is how the sound changes. Males increase the frequency when showing off, and the hum gets sharper around flowers and feeders during a chase.

A tone rather than a rhythm is produced from the thin, stiff primary feathers slicing through the air too quickly for the ear to track individual strokes. High wind speeds will scatter the sound, making detection unreliable outside of a few meters. A feeder or along a garden edge in spring and summer on a calm, bright morning will offer a good listening opportunity.

3) Broad-winged Hawk: Deep Beats Between Long Silences

Each downstroke causes a large amount of air to be displaced, resulting in a measurable whoom that is pronounced enough to be heard in the powered sections between glides. This is especially true when combined with a broad, rounded primary and a high wing load.

Broad-winged hawks demonstrate an infrequent flapping pattern. After a tight beat of deep flaps, a long glide follows, making the beats contrast against the quieter portions of the sky. During autumn migration across warm river valleys, bird watchers can hear the beats before seeing the bird. High circling kettles make sound identification easier than visual identification.

“Birders frequently hear the wingbeats before the bird resolves overhead.”

4) Wilson’s Snipe: Winnowing at Dawn Over Wet Ground

Here, the focus is on winnowing. This phenomenon is caused by the movement of air through the bird’s outer tail feathers as it performs a courtship display. So, the snipe does not make this sound using its vocal tract; it is made, instead, from the outer tail feathers, which, as the snipe goes up and down, produce a loud, resonating sound, and also from rapid wing beats, which sustain the airflow and cause the feathers to vibrate like a reed.

Field studies link display frequency to mating behavior, and birds repeat each winnowing pass for several seconds over marshes and bogs in spring and early summer. The sound is loud enough to hear before the bird is visible. Walking quietly to an open wet meadow or boardwalk at dawn or dusk, well before breeding season peaks, gives the best chance of hearing a displaying bird pass overhead against the sky.

5) White-throated Swift: Speed Made Audible

They have a scythe shape for wings, and a fast wing beat rate produces a sound that is more of a single whoosh as opposed to a number of distinct beats. The first year of this bird’s life, the primary feathers are closely positioned, which minimizes the air flow and turbulence produced in each stroke of the wing and pulls together several small aerodynamic events into a single note.

The species’ sounds assist with the identification of the birds by sight. Furthermore, swallows can make a sound similar to the interrupted beat sound described earlier, which can lead to confusion with respect to swifts. The distinguishing feature that separates swifts from swallows is the ability of swifts to make a sustained tone. When flying in close formation and from a distance, the sustained tones produced by swifts can be used to distinguish them from swallows.

6) Olive-sided Flycatcher: Brief, Buzzy, and Concentrated

The sound of wing beats here is low and buzzy, almost mechanical. It is a throbbing sound rather than a rhythmic, musical sound. With stiff primary feathers, short and direct sallys produce claps, and the relatively greater body weight than other flycatchers aids in the amplification of the low-frequency sound produced by each stroke of the wings.

The sound of wing beats is concentrated and brief as birds engage in a sit-and-wait hunting strategy. With hard launches, the birds take the insects and return. Each sally back and forth produces a buzz sound that is not constant, but is associated with the movement of the wings. During migration, the habitat contexts of the edges of forests, burned regions, and open clearings are best. The buzz is heard, while the exposed perches are scanned in those areas, confirming the species, even in the absence of song.

7) American Woodcock: The Rising Whistle of a Displaying Male

The stiff and narrowed vanes of the modified outer primary feathers produce one of the most unique wing beat sounds in North America. An exhibiting male on open ground at dusk ascends in narrow spirals, and the fast-moving air over those feathers causes a nasal, ascending whistle. As the male ascends and his airspeed increases, the pitch of this whistle rises, and when the male closes his wings and dives back into the cover, it drops sharply.

The sounds made during the displays should not be called vocalizations. The call described above was not made by the bird flying overhead. When a bird is airborne, the beating of its wings creates a whistle, and so sound is produced. In early spring, if you find a place with a wet thicket or a young stand of alders, you are likely to hear the entire sequence of a display, so try to be there about 30 minutes after sunset. You will find that all the displays and the ground calls of each sequence were synchronized with the sounds made by the wing beats.

8) Common Tern: Metallic and Fast Over Coastal Water

When narrow, pointed primaries move quickly, they create a high-pitched metallic sound that allows separation from the deeper wing-thumps of gulls in the same airspace. The stiff tips of the feathers vibrate with each stroke and produce a sound that is tight and mechanical, while the bird is in steady commuting or quartering flight over the water.

Common Terns are made for speed and endurance. The structure of their wings allows for high wing-beat frequencies and low drag, as well as pushing the sound to a higher and more metallic level. During spring and summer, as the terns’ breeding season begins, passing birds whine at eye level at listeners’ close overhead and at marshes and islands of colonies. Against the background sounds of the laughing gulls or black-backed gulls, their sound stands out.

9) Blackpoll Warbler: A Zipper Hum at the Edge of Audibility

Blackpolls produce a sound like a mechanical zipper during migrations over the sea, which can go unnoticed. Their small and stiff wings produce this sound due to the rapid beating of the wings at very high frequencies, which makes the sound like a buzz. During their migrations, the blackpolls keep their wing beats compact and at high frequencies, which enables them to achieve the remarkable feat of overwater flights, flying non-stop from the northeastern United States to South America.

That energetic demand keeps the wingbeat pattern steady and the buzz uniform. Fall migration along coastal headlands and spruce-fir edges at dawn and dusk offers the most likely listening context. Birds moving low past a treeline or skimming over open water produce the clearest wing hum, and in those moments, the sound can attach a name to a bird that passes too quickly for a full plumage read.

10) Turkey Vulture: Long Silence, Then a Soft Thump

The primary feathers are widely spaced and slotted, and the wing beat frequency is low, resulting in a soft, low thump sound that is produced rarely, with long gliding intervals in between. During gliding, the wings held at a dihedral angle reduce the aerodynamic sounds generated by the wing beats, making the thumping sounds prominent in the quiet gliding intervals.

The bird relies on rising air rather than sustained flapping. Wide slotted wingtips reduce induced drag and allow the vulture to extract energy from thermals with minimal mechanical effort. On warm afternoons over ridgelines, agricultural fields, and highway corridors where thermals concentrate, the pattern is visible before it is audible: a slow, deliberate flap followed by a long, motionless glide. At a distance, when plumage details are indistinct, the timing and softness of those infrequent thumps help confirm a black silhouette as a vulture rather than an eagle.

11) Peregrine Falcon: Heavy and Percussive in a Stoop

A Peregrine’s wingbeats transition from smooth to percussive when it breaks from a glide and commits to a stoop. Each stroke is louder and more isolated. The broad and stiff primary feathers, in combination with high wing loading, create very powerful downstrokes, and the compression of air over the wings increases the volume of the downbeat. Because the feather tips are not free to vibrate, the sound has more of a clean thump than a buzzy or thin sound.

With increasing airspeed and deeper stoops, birds will beat their wings less. This is a counterintuitive mechanical process, as a decrease in airspeed requires the bird to beat its wings less in order to keep moving. The thumping noise and the dark slate back with finely barred underparts that cross your field of vision are from cliffs, tall buildings and rich marsh edges during migration and nesting seasons.

The Science Behind Avian Wingbeat Sounds

Feathers, their flapping speed, and wing structure influence the sound produced while beating wings. Different sounds can be produced; some may be deep and thud-like, while others may be high-pitched and continuous. Sounds made by individuals are produced due to specific anatomy and behavior, leading to the production of sounds that are consistent enough to be utilized in the field.

Aerodynamics of Feathers

The first feathers on a barn swallow’s wing are slender and have stiff shafts, with the vanes being thin enough to shed vortices at each downstroke. This results in a high-pitched, fast trill when the bird is flying quickly and directly across open terrain. The rapid beats of the bird’s wings raise the pitch, and in quick pursuits or at courtship displays, when the bird must change the position of the primaries to increase turbulence, the pitch elevates even more. The swallow’s primary harmonics are most likely to be heard in the early morning hours in the fields as the swallows hunt for insects and fly in low, tightly packed formations.

Individual and Species-Level Variation

Woodpeckers provide a unique example. Their wings generate a strong, rhythmic sound that travels a long distance. This is due to their primary feathers being wider than those of other birds, allowing them to push more air. The change in air resistance lowers the sound of their wings, allowing the sound to carry farther. The age of the feathers also contributes to this. A molting bird, especially in the primaries, can change the overall sound of the bird, as the feathers alter the pitch and volume. A bird that is undergoing a heavy primary molt will have a very different sound compared to other birds from the same species that have new feathers.

With regards to behavior, this adds to the complexity. Migratory birds will maintain a steady wingbeat rhythm, while those that are calling or defending a territory will increase and sharpen the tempo. When standing at the edge of a moving woodland, recognizing and distinguishing the steady whoom of a woodpecker among the sharper, faster beats of the other birds is a skill that one develops with practice.

Field Techniques for Hearing Wingbeats

Optimizing Listening Conditions

Wind direction is also important to consider. When standing with the wind at your back, you can hear the sounds of the wing beats clearly because they are traveling toward you. This is particularly true in open country when you are located downwind from areas where birds are known to fly such as river bends, ridges, field borders, and low grass. In forested areas, gaps in the canopy and edges of clearings where birds are flying concentrate the repeated wingbeats and are the best places to look for high traffic areas.

Bug noise, thermal activity, and wind all tend to be less active during these times, so they can be great times for birding. Birders may also be surprised by how much they will need to hush the gear they are using. A loud pack zipper, shifting tripod, or even a jacket rustling could cover up a gentle rattle noise or mechanical noise if it is close enough. If you are trying to determine what flight pattern a bird is using or what sound a bird is making, try to keep your head in the same spot for as long as possible. This increases the chance of you being able to connect a sound to a bird instead of looking at so many different things at the same time.

Distinguishing Environmental Noise

Both traffic sounds and wind sounds qualify as white noise, as they are constant and do not vary. The beats of bird wings can also be predicted and rhythmic. Once someone gets used to a particular bird species, they can even obtain sufficient practice to count the wing flaps of the bird. For example, they could learn that a hummingbird flaps its wings more than 50 times a second, while a turkey vulture only does so 2 to 3 times per glide cycle. Most other bird species would fall somewhere in between these two values.

Note direction and elevation. Low, fluttering sounds near vegetation indicate short, slow flights. Clean high pulses indicate fast direct flights above the canopy. In less clear situations, a short audio recording and playback at slower speeds sometimes shows that the ear cannot resolve the harmonics of feather vibrations in real time. Those harmonics can distinguish species with overlapping wingbeat rates but differing in feather structure.

The ear is one of the most underutilized tools for bird identification. Most birders stop listening after identifying a song or call. However, wingbeat sounds require a different kind of focus, one that is useful when there is little light, the bird is only present for a short time, and song is absent.