If you’re a bird-watching enthusiast, hearing loss can be a significant setback to enjoying birding to its full potential. You may struggle to differentiate bird calls, or even hear them at all. Find enjoyment in birding again with hearing aids.
How Hearing Loss Works
The two most common types of hearing loss are age-related hearing loss and noise-induced hearing loss. In both types of hearing loss, the first thing you lose is the ability to hear high-pitched sounds. This happens because the cells inside your inner ear that are responsible for collecting and transmitting sound information for high-pitched sounds—like birdsong—are the first to die off. Natural aging will cause these cells to wear out, and loud noises damage them. Unfortunately, these cells do not regenerate, so the hearing loss is irreversible.
How Hearing Aids Help with Birding
The good news is that hearing aids can help you hear birdsong again. Here are some advancements in hearing aid technology that bring the song back into birdsong.
Hear Clearly Again
First and foremost, hearing aids help you hear. Your hearing professional will program your hearing aids to match your specific hearing loss. Tones you struggle to perceive will be emphasized. Volume will be amplified. Better yet, it’s projected directly and clearly into your ear.
Custom Birding Settings
Hearing aids have multiple hearing programs in which settings are pre-adjusted for specific listening scenarios. For example, you will likely have a setting for communicating in a noisy environment, such as a restaurant. This setting focuses on the sounds of speech and deemphasizes background noise. Likewise, your hearing professional can create a setting specifically for listening to birds. This setting will enhance higher notes and back off on the background noise reduction.
Directionality
With untreated hearing loss, your ears and brain struggle to process sound information, so you may notice that you have difficulty identifying where a noise is coming from. Hearing aids address this. Omnidirectional microphones pick up sounds from every angle, allowing you to hear the birds in front of, above, and behind you.
Sound Processing
Hearing aid technology grows more advanced every day. A complaint that hearing aid users used to have was about sound processing; sometimes, hearing aids would create a slight lag in sound, causing the wearer to hear the noise a beat after it was made. This doesn’t work for birding, since birds move very quickly. Newer hearing aids now have much faster sound processing, virtually eliminating that lag, meaning you can pinpoint where the bird is more easily.
Visit an Audiologist
If you’re ready to begin your hearing aids journey and get back to enjoying your favorite hobbies, call Hearing Healthcare Center, Inc.. We’re happy to be your partner in hearing health. Schedule an appointment for a hearing test today.