Hearing aids for Birders

I have typical high-frequency hearing loss and am using Oticon OPN 1 hearing aids. I do a lot of birding and find that with these aids I can hear the majority of bird songs reasonably well. I have turned on the speech rescue feature which has the effect of shifting some of the higher frequencies down to a lower frequency band and it seems to help with some of the bird calls that are very high pitched like the blackburian warbler and the grasshopper sparrow.

It doesn’t give you perfect hearing for those high frequencies but it does help a lot. With the aids I do much better while birding than without them. There may be other brands of aids that work as well or better but the Oticons seem to do the job for me.

Thanks. Do you happen to know what setting Speech Rescue is set at? I’d guess what hearing aids work would depend a lot on one’s loss. Your loss doesn’t really get severe until after 6k. Thanks again.

Yeah, no hearing aid is going to offer any assistance at 23 hz, but I’m guessing that’s a frequency you feel more than hear and most people wouldn’t need any assistance detecting it. The bird songs in the link I posted ranged from 3khz to 11khz. That frequency range is going to be problematic for anybody with any kind of high frequency loss. Somebody with only a mild high frequency loss, might get by with hearing aids with an extended range (Signia’s 12khz comes to mind), but anybody with any significant high frequency loss is going to need some sort of frequency lowering to hear those sounds.

I have had a pair of Phonak Audeo B90-R’s for a little over a week now. Phonak’s version of shifting high frequencies lower is called “Sound Recover 2”. Mine are set for the minimum “strength” of sound recover yet I find it to work better than I expected and as good as I hoped for. The birds do not sound distorted - they are entirely recognizable. I have a mulberry tree full of waxwings. I knew they were there by sight, but now I hear them all the time when I am out in the yard. I have easily heard black-throated-blue warblers, black-and-white warblers, and blue-gray gnatcatchers without straining my ears. The black-and-white warbler would “disappear” while singing if I muted the hearing aids. I have not run into a blackpoll yet, but hear it well when played through a song app on my phone. The other thing I have noticed is that my ability to detect direction and distance of the calling bird has improved dramatically. In addition, I have had problems with past hearing aids that amplified ambient noise (wind, leaves, traffic) in addition to the birds. These hearing aids seem to be able to make the birds audible without a disturbing increase in unwanted noise. I am not using a special programming for birds. I am using them on the default “Autosense” setting.

I’m not a birder, but live on a farm and recently got my first aids, OPN1s. One of the things I’m most astounded by is the amount and volume of birdsong I couldn’t hear before. It’s pretty awesome.