The echoing sounds guide Dan Kish as sonar guides a bat. He rates the method over tapping a cane and teaches it to others.

As Dan Kish moved through the parking lot of the Blind Children’s Learning Center one recent morning, people nearby could hear the clicking of his tongue.

Kish, 31, is blind and, like a bat or a whale using sonar, he listens to echoes from his tongue clicks to determine whether objects are near or far, large or small.

In familiar surroundings, Kish might click once a minute. If he is in a strange place, he will click repeatedly. Or, if he wants to pinpoint an object, he might scan the area, clicking from right to left.

The use of echolocation is common among blind people, but the tapping of canes usually generates the sound.

While Kish does use a cane to scan for ground-level objects such as rocks and curbs, he says echolocation with tongue clicks is more efficient because the echoes bounce back to your ears and are not distorted by the ground.

The echoes from a branch of leaves will give off a number of small, weak sounds. The echoes from denser objects such as cars will give back stronger sounds.

Kish, who may click loudly or softly depending on the situation, said blind people do not have superior hearing skills but learn to pick up sounds that others shut out.

Jim Willows, president of the National Federation of the Blind’s California chapter, said he has heard of only about two other people who use tongue clicks for echolocation.

But if tongue clicks work for Kish, that’s fine with Willows.

“You could be considered kind of strange if you’re going down the street clicking your tongue,” he said, “but it’s definitely possible.”

Patricia Maurer, spokeswoman at the blind federation headquarters in Baltimore, had never heard of the tongue click method but maintained that cane taps are superior.

“If it were that good, we’d all have been taught to do it,” she said.

Kish, who lost his sight to cancer of the retina when he was 13 months old, said he has been using his tongue as a type of sonar for as long as he can remember. He can’t recall how he learned it.

“I’ve been clicking probably since I had a tongue,” he said. “It’s kind of like asking a kid, ‘So how did you learn to catch a ball?’ ”

Kish, one of the country’s few blind-mobility instructors who is himself blind, has given pointers to his students on his method of echolocation.

As Kish taught a mobility lesson in the learning center parking lot recently, he moved easily from car to car and avoided a nearby observer, clicking his tongue all the while.

Kish has master’s degrees in developmental psychology and special education, with a certificate in mobility instruction. He grew up in Brea and Placentia, and said he had always attended regular schools, clicking all the time. His tests and books were in Braille or on audiotape.

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While campus life may be easier for sighted students, Kish said his blindness helped him with two of the more notorious subjects, physics and spatial geometry.

“To me, a lot of reality is a matter of arithmetic,” Kish explained. “Sometimes, I cannot perceive where things are, but I can calculate where they should be.”

While Kish may not be able to say how he started using tongue clicks, he can pinpoint why: to take advantage of the many opportunities he was afforded as a child, such as riding a bicycle.

Kish recalls crashing into the occasional parked car or light pole. But the clicking allowed him to ride his bicycle for games like dive bomber and smash-up derby, where riders try to knock each other down.

Kish said he now depends more on buses, trains and taxis to get around, but still rides his bicycle on occasion.

After working part time for the Blind Children’s Learning Center, Kish will start full time in September as an outreach coordinator, the highest position a blind person has held at the organization. In addition to running a preschool for about 60 children, the nonprofit center provides counseling and mobility and Braille instruction for another 100 county residents.

Kish will be teaching tongue clicking as part of mobility training.

“Anyone with the motivation and experience can develop this kind of skill,” he said. “I developed it in the same way any person develops any skill--through practice.”