I am thrilled to announce that I have signed a book contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to produce The Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds, the first comprehensive guide to the sounds of North American birds. In addition to species accounts that will illustrate each sound of each species with spectrograms, the book will feature an innovative audio index that will make it possible to look up unfamiliar sounds in the field.
The guide will be published in two volumes, Eastern and Western. The tentative publication date for the Eastern volume is 2015, with the Western volume following about nine months later. The books will be accompanied by thousands of streaming online audio clips from the collection of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, supplemented by my own recordings and those of Andrew Spencer in addition to a number of other fine recordists. The streaming audio will be freely and publicly accessible on the internet. The Macaulay clips, at least, will be downloadable for an extra fee.
Perspective
So far, this book project has been nearly a decade in the making. It was in 2003 that I first conceived of an index to bird sounds as the basis for an audio field guide. At the time, I was completely unqualified to realize my vision, but I set out to do it anyway, hoping against hope that nobody would beat me to it. Virtually everything related to bird sounds that I’ve done since — including this entire blog and every single one of my recordings — has been done with this goal in mind.
I set out to write this book because I desperately wanted to use it in the field. I’ve never had the supersonic ears of a Ted Floyd or the tape-recorder memory of a Ted Parker; memorization-based approaches haven’t worked all that well for me. I wanted a book that would contain vast quantities of bird sound knowledge so that my head didn’t have to.
Bird sounds needed
As I go through the painstaking process of researching the sounds of each species, I regularly find out about sounds that are not represented, or poorly represented, in the audio collections I have access to. I have created a Google spreadsheet with a preliminary list of the sounds I still need recordings of (or better recordings of). Some of them are obscure and rarely heard, but some of them are easy — the kind of thing I could record on an average day in my neighborhood if I had a little more free time. The list is regularly updated as my research progresses, and it will be permanently linked under “Bird Sounds Needed” at the top of the page.
If you record bird sounds, please take a look — and if you think you might be able to help me out, please drop me a line at npieplow@gmail.com.
Paul Lehman once joked that after he reached a certain age, Grasshopper Sparrows no longer sang, they just yawned.
Birders tend to notice hearing loss before other people. We’re one of the few groups who care a great deal about hearing faint, high-pitched sounds, like the “tseet” of a distant chickadee that might alert us to the presence of a mixed-species flock of migrants. Many older birders have written about the experience tracking their hearing loss from the high-pitched species gradually down to the low-pitched ones.
I’ve been concerned about my own ears recently. I’m not yet 40, but hearing loss runs in my family, and for the past couple years, it’s become obvious that most of my birding friends can detect a chickadee at twice the distance that I can. For some reason it’s even worse with Blue-gray Gnatcatchers — I can’t hear them at all anymore if they’re more than 75 yards away.
For my whole life, my right ear’s been much worse than my left. Even as a child I could only answer the phone with my left ear, and sleeping on my left side has always been a natural way of turning down the volume in the bedroom. But in the past few weeks, I started noticing that my “good” ear was deteriorating considerably. When I put my headphones on to listen to a recording, the right ear sounded louder. My fiancee started commenting that I was having more and more trouble hearing what she was saying when we were in public places.
So, today, she finally convinced me to go to the audiologist.
Half a second after looking in my left ear, he declared, “you have a massive buildup of earwax in there.” With a tiny scoop, he pulled out a disgusting black glob the size and shape of an earplug. I had no idea it was there, and it didn’t even hurt to remove, but the improvement in my hearing was immediate. According to the audiologist, a buildup like this can happen to anybody, at any time. It’s just one of those things.
He proceeded to screen my ears in the usual way. It turns out that I do have high-pitched hearing loss, but without the homemade earplug, it’s not that bad yet. Right now I’m only a borderline candidate for a hearing aid. He said that unless it started really bothering me, I could come back in for another checkup in five years. Music to my (newly restored) ears.
Brown Creeper, Pueblo County, CO, November 2006. Photo courtesy of Bill Schmoker
The dawn chorus. You love it or you hate it.
If you hate it, it’s probably because you don’t appreciate being roused from sleep by a vigorous burst of birdsong in the early morning darkness. This is a common sentiment in the parts of the world where we now think of nature as an interruption of our experience, rather than the medium through which it flows.
If you love the dawn chorus, it may be for its music, its regularity, its symbolism. Or just for the happy reminder that nature survives, at least in some form, right outside the window.
I love the dawn chorus in part because it contains songs that you can hear at no other time of day. A number of North American birds sing dawn songs unlike anything they say after sunrise. I’ve written here about several: Violet-green Swallow, American Robin, Cassin’s Kingbird, Cordilleran and Pacific-slope Flycatchers. But if you had asked me six months ago whether Brown Creeper had a distinctive dawn song, I would have told you no.
Here’s the typical song of the Brown Creeper — a short high-pitched warble, repeated without much variation:
Most sources say that this song can be heard at any time of day. Some observers have reported hearing it as early as 4:50 in the morning, but it doesn’t seem to be given regularly or repeatedly at that hour. Instead, most Brown Creepers apparently start their day with utterances like this one:
Brown Creeper dawn song, Coos County, OR, 7/1/1990. Recording by Geoff Keller (ML 50337).
(Click here to listen to this recording at the Macaulay Library website.)
Two “tseew” notes followed by two “trill” calls may not sound like much of a dawn song, especially since the “tseew” and the “trill” are two of the common calls given by Brown Creepers throughout the day — the “tseew” mostly in alarm, the “trill” in a variety of situations. But this is not just a string of calls mixed together at random. The calls comprise a repeated and stereotyped sequence: “tseew tseew trill trill… tseew tseew trill trill… tseew tseew trill trill… tseew tseew trill trill.” The exact pattern varies from one bird to the next, but each individual adheres to its own fairly rigid syntax and rhythm. They’re not just calling, they’re singing.
Brown Creepers, unlike many other species, appear to transition gradually from dawn singing patterns into daytime singing patterns. They start out with these stereotyped patterns of “tseets” and “trills” and then, as the sun rises, they start tossing in “regular” song strophes more and more frequently. Here’s a sunrise recording from New Jersey in which the dawn songs and the day songs are alternated. And here’s a dawn-singing bird from Arizona that introduces each strophe of day song with components of the dawn song:
I have a recording, also from Arizona, of a Brown Creeper doing something similar as late as 9:00 AM. Later in the day, the dawn song patterns apparently disappear altogether.
More study of Brown Creeper dawn-singing is needed. For example, it would be interesting to determine patterns of individual and geographic variation, and to find out whether and how birds respond to playback of the dawn song. If you live near Brown Creepers, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find answers to some of these questions next spring — as long as you’re willing to rise before the birds.
The internet is full of wild bird videos. If you want to learn about behavior and vocalizations, it can be a great place to start, at least for certain species. Gulls are a terrific example. They’re loud, they’re conspicuous, they’re tame, and when engaged in their behaviors, they ignore gawking humans with videocameras. I was able to observe more behaviors from more gull species in a few hours on YouTube than I could have seen in a couple of weeks at the beach.
Today, I share the fruits of my labors, categorized by species and behavior type. This is nowhere near comprehensive — each time I go back to the internet, I find more videos worth including. I’ve had to limit this to the large gulls (genus Larus) for now, and even so, many species aren’t even represented here at all yet. If you find footage worth including, please leave a comment or shoot me an email and let me know.
For an introduction to the gull behaviors mentioned here, see my last post. Enjoy!
American Herring Gull
Cornell’s “How Nature Works: Gull Territoriality” — a good overview of gull behaviors, starring mostly Herring Gulls and a few Great Black-backeds
Aggressive encounter with “mew” duet, “choking” display, and fighting. Connecticut, late fall.
Pair of Herring Gulls giving head toss / courtship begging calls, then copulating (loud narration by people nearly throughout)
Copulating pair in Rhode Island (voices of birds hard to hear)
Two juvenile Herring Gulls giving begging calls (July, Saskatchewan)
Glaucous-winged Gull (and/or intergrades)
A pair of apparent Glaucous-wingeds in a park in Washington State in spring — probable courtship behavior, including Mew calls.
A pair-bonding display between two Glaucous-wingeds or possible intergrades: one bird (perhaps the female) gives the Head toss / food-begging call, and the other bird regurgitates a fish
Pair on streetlight, head-tossing, with some begging bill pecks, and accompanying calls; species ID not clear
Western Gull
Pair of apparent Western Gulls giving Mew calls, perhaps some “Choking” displays, then fighting at end:
Solo Western Gull giving a few Mew calls. Catalina Island
Pair fighting with bills locked, apparently without vocalizing; then they break apart and give multiple Long Calls; then a more violent, briefer fight; then the victor struts around giving some low grunts and a final Long Call
Six nice food-begging calls given with head-tosses by one member of a pair on Alcatraz
Female giving head-toss begging call; male quickly mounts; eventually copulation begins accompanied by male copulation grunts. Audio rather terrible. Near Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco.
Copulation with decent audio of male copulation notes. Start and end not shown. La Jolla, California
Copulation; video rather brief but audio decent, with the exception of one comment in middle by videographer
Two Western Gulls fighting in parking lot, giving kek-kek calls (alarm chuckles) constantly. Video from second-story deck with commentary.
Heermann’s Gull
Two nice Long Calls, display postures and all, from one individual
Very brief video of some rapid nasal series, including some possible Long Calls
Iceland Gull
Iceland Gull calls once, rather faintly, near the end of this video (short low nasal bark):
Lesser Black-backed Gull (subspecies graellsii or similar)
One nice Long Call with full display postures, Liverpool, UK:
Closeup of a bird giving alarm chuckles and one Long Call with medium-strong display postures; a little disruptive wind noise:
Pretty cool territorial interaction between a Lesser Black-backed and a European Herring Gull – a Long Call duet at the start, then lots of Mew calls. A few chuckles and “how” calls from the Lesser Black-backed after it wins the fight.
Pair of Lesser Black-backeds Mew-calling in duet; some choking grunts while crouching on ground. Don’t miss Maarten van Kleinwee’s fascinating blog post about this pair and its behavior.
Feeding frenzy of birds, in Iceland in late May, being fed bread. All or mostly Lesser Black-backeds. Plenty of single-note calls.
Adult giving nasal “how” calls, with same from background birds
Alarm chuckles and a few decent mews; then a good long series of a duet of yelp calls; no head-tossing or other obvious displays; context uncertain. Near Reading, UK
Close-up of bird giving a few alarm chuckles. Alkmaar, Netherlands.
Have you heard an Ivory Gull vocalize? I have! (Didn't get any recordings, unfortunately.) Photo by Martha de Jong-Lantink, Spitsbergen, 8/19/2008 (CC 2.0).
Gull enthusiasts are weird. They hang out at landfills. They go to the beach when it’s freezing cold, or just to see what’s in the parking lot. They’ll stare at a single bird for hours, puzzling over insanely minute details – the precise shade of gray on the back as measured by the Kodak gray scale, the age and condition of individual feathers, and even (I am not joking) the color of the inside of the bird’s mouth. When it comes to identifying a mystery gull, they look at everything; they ignore nothing.
Except vocalizations.
Gulls have voices, but you’d hardly know it from reading the identification literature.
In all the thousands and thousands of words written each year about gull identification by experts on the ID-Frontiers listerv, vocalizations are mentioned approximately never. P.J. Grant’s classic book Gulls: A Guide to Identification contains not a single mention of voice. Howell & Dunn’s Gulls of the Americas refers to voice only in passing, in the introduction, and omits it from the species accounts. Olsen & Larsson’s authoritative Gulls of Europe, Asia and North America briefly mentions only a few sounds for each species.
I think the general neglect of voice can be explained by three factors:
Gull sounds are variable. Two individuals of the same species may sound very different.
Gull sounds are plastic. Two calls from the same bird may sound very different.
Gull sounds are poorly understood.
Those first two problems are not to be underestimated. Until recently, my main experience with gull sounds came from attempting to record some Ring-billed Gulls fighting over some bread I’d thrown them. I was astonished (and frankly intimidated) by the huge variety of sounds I heard. They whistled, they squealed, they barked, they bleated, they gargled:
I really couldn’t make sense of it. Could these vastly different calls be merely variations on a simple-minded expression of hunger? I began to worry that gull sounds might well be too variable to be of much use in identification.
Then I had another experience that changed my perspective.
The Western Gull Rosetta Stone
Long Call posture, held for most of the call after the initial bow. Herring Gull shown; Western is similar. From Tinbergen 1960a.
Last month I attended the Western Field Ornithologists’ Conference in Petaluma, California, where I tracked down local gull expert and field guide author Steve N. G. Howell for an answer to my burning question: “Where can I record gulls around here without too much ocean noise?”
After some thought, Steve sent me to the parking lot at Stinson Beach. It was just what I was looking for: an open, public area only a few yards from the ocean, but sheltered from the surf noise by a nice high earthen berm. I got there early in the morning and found myself alone in the parking lot with a couple dozen gulls of two species (Heermann’s and Western). Conditions were good, but even so, I was unprepared for the show.
It started when a pair of Western Gulls broke into a Long Call Duet. Standing close together, they bowed their heads down once toward the pavement and then stretched their necks out at a 45-degree upward angle for the rest of the call:
Western Gull long call duet, Stinson Beach, CA, 9/29/2012.
Immediately, both birds transitioned into a slow series of long, rising wails, much like the sounds of a peacock, as they strutted around the parking lot in parallel, necks fully extended, bills pointed downward:
Western Gull "mew" duet, Stinson Beach, CA, 9/29/2012.
"Mew" duet posture. From Tinbergen 1960a.
Then one bird picked up some leaves and twigs in its bill. It crouched down on the ground as though it wanted to begin building a nest scrape, or perhaps as though it were soliciting copulation. It began giving short, quiet grunts while its partner continued to wail occasionally:
Western Gull grunts during "choking" display, Stinson Beach, CA, 9/29/2012.
"Choking" display, from Tinbergen 1960b.
Just when I thought the show couldn’t get any better, a third Western Gull flew in, and one member of the duetting pair charged off to confront it. The two locked bills in an intense tug-of-war, wings out for balance, giving a soft but threatening chuckle vocalization:
Western Gull alarm chuckle, Stinson Beach, CA, 9/29/2012.
Herring Gulls fighting, from Tinbergen 1960b.
Fans of Alfred Hitchcock may remember that chuckle — it’s the sound dubbed into The Birds whenever the Western Gulls gather ominously. (Hitchcock added a little echo, to make it even spookier.)
When I got home, I discovered I’d recorded over half an hour of this remarkable show, and an additional ten minutes or more of myself narrating behavioral notes into the microphone. It was the highlight of my entire trip to California.
Surprise, Surprise
The distinctiveness of each of the sounds I recorded, and the fact that each was obviously tied to a different social context, gave me a whole new view of gulls and their vocalizations.
Because I made those detailed notes on the posture and context of each sound, I was able to match each one up pretty well with the established literature on gull vocalizations (especially the pioneering work of Niko Tinbergen 1960a, 1960b). The peacock-like wail is called the “Mew” call; the grunting accompanies the “Choking” display; and the chuckle is known as the alarm call. Clearly, at least some of the time, gulls are more than just screaming kleptomaniacs. They are capable of wonderfully complex and evocative social communication.
Flirting or Fighting?
My original hypothesis was that I was observing courtship behavior, but this may actually have been an aggressive territorial encounter, perhaps between two males. All of these displays are used in both aggression and in courtship.
Supporting the courtship hypothesis is the fact that this duetting pair never resorted to fighting. When a third bird arrived, one of the displaying pair fought it off, while the other member of the pair looked on in agitation, giving a very long Long Call sequence. When the third bird was driven off, the pair display resumed immediately between what I took to be the original two birds.
Furthermore, this pair’s strutting dance didn’t seem restricted to any territorial boundary. Instead it rambled over hundreds of yards of parking lot, seemingly at random. Every once in a while the two birds would break off and drift apart, silently or with a few chuckle calls. Once, when the two birds were widely separated, one of them crouched without apparent provocation and started giving a series of “Choking” grunts. The second member of the pair immediately began walking towards it from a hundred yards away, taking up the wailing “Mew” cry when it got close. The entire episode seemed to have the air of solicitation rather than confrontation.
Supporting the territorial interpretation, however, is the fact that it was late September. Western Gulls aren’t supposed to start pairing up for mating until January at the earliest. I couldn’t tell the sex of the birds. Although I kept expecting copulation to occur, it never did. Nor did I see any of the unambiguous pair-bonding displays, such as the regurgitation of fish, which is the gull equivalent of recreational sex.
Gulls of several species have been reported to defend winter feeding territories, and that could have been what these birds were doing. Perhaps a local breeder was fending off an interloper in search of winter turf.
The Take-Home Message
Somewhere near you, right about now, a pair of gulls is about to engage in a loud and conspicuous display. They’ll do it wherever they find themselves — in a park, on a city street, at the grocery store — with little regard for what’s around them. You’ll be able to walk right up to them with your camera, your smartphone, your recorder.
Do it. Take notes on what you see. Post your resulting pictures/video/audio to Flickr/YouTube/Xeno-Canto. Then drop me a line.
We don’t know enough about gull displays, especially not in fall and winter. Most research on gulls has taken place on the breeding grounds, and it’s possible that we don’t know about autumn courtship because we haven’t been paying attention. We also don’t know much about identifying gulls by voice — but all we need to do is listen. By sharing our observations online, we have the power to learn a ton. Let’s give it a try.
What bird species always twists its head to the left when singing, never to the right?
When I came upon the claim in the scientific literature that singing male Yellow-headed Blackbirds always turn their heads to the left and never to the right, I immediately had to verify it for myself. Since the migratory Yellow-heads in my neighborhood have mostly skipped town, I went where the birds are always singing: YouTube.
As far as I can tell, the claim is correct. At least, I haven’t been able to find a video yet that disproves it. But let’s be exact: each male Yellow-head has two different kinds of advertising songs, and only one of them is accompanied by the leftward head-twist. Some researchers call these two song types the Accenting Song and the Buzzing Song.
The Accenting Song (of short, somewhat musical notes):
is given in the Symmetrical Song Spread display posture:
Illustration from Orians & Christman 1968.
The Buzzing Song (a marvelous yowl like a dying cat’s):
is given in the Asymmetrical Song Spread display posture (with the left wing raised and the head turned left):
Illustration from Orians & Christman 1968.
Some caveats apply, of course. The display postures illustrated above are typical of excited males. When the birds are less motivated, they may move their wings and head very little. But the fact remains that in the dozen or so YouTube videos that I watched, if the head moved at all during the Buzzing Song, it always went to the left.
This is not the only instance of “handedness” (what scientists call “chirality” or “laterality”) among birds. Parrots have been reported to be mostly left-handed; so has at least one individual Short-eared Owl (in a series of stunning photos). Preference for one foot or the other has also been reported in a few species of Central American finches.
It’s not just feet, wings, and heads that may be lateralized. Some birds show a preference for using one side of the syrinx when vocalizing. And a few birds have physical asymmetries: the New Zealand Wrybill has a bill that is always bent to the right. In the White-winged Crossbill, the lower mandible crosses to the right in approximately 75% of individuals. In its relative the Red Crossbill, however, the lower mandible crosses to the right in about half of birds, and to the left in the other half.
The authors of the parrot study go so far as to speculate that handedness may have originally evolved in species that, like parrots, have eyes on the side of their head — and so must choose a direction to turn each time they want to look at something dead ahead. Whatever the reason, this is an aspect of bird behavior that is easily observed and quantified — but usually ignored.
I know I’ll be paying more attention to the singing Yellow-headed Blackbirds when they come back north next spring!
If only it would sing! Probable Hammond's Flycatcher, Wyoming, 6/17/2010. Photo by Bryant Olsen (CC-by-nc-2.0)
Empidonax flycatchers are tough to identify by sight. Every birder knows it. They’re the classic bugaboo of North American bird identification. That’s why every field guide mentions the importance of listening to their voices.
But Empids make a lot of sounds. Forget about learning “the song” and “the call.” Most Empids have repertoires of 6-8 different songs and calls. Some species, such as Pacific-slope and Cordilleran, have a dawn song that’s different from anything they say during the day. Several, including Least, Yellow-bellied, Hammond’s, and Dusky, have complex, rarely-heard flight songs. The species with the largest vocabulary appears to be Acadian Flycatcher, which has all of the above types of song plus another type, sometimes called the “evening song,” which is the most complex of all. (It may or may not be fully separate from the flight song.)
Today I’m going to be talking about a class of Empid vocalizations that don’t get much press. I’ll call them “Two-part Calls” since they don’t have an official name. Based on their similarity, the “two-part calls” appear to be homologous — that is, evolutionarily equivalent, all descended from the same calling behavior of a common ancestor.
As far as I know, three species of Empids give these calls. In one species, the two-part call is familiar enough to be mentioned in field guides, at least. The two-part call of the second species is described only in the scientific literature. And that of the third is, as far as I know, being described in this blog post for the first time.
Dusky Flycatcher: “Du-hic”
This call is mentioned in the Sibley Guide to Birds, Kenn Kaufmann’s Advanced Birding, and other well-researched field guides. The “du” part of the call is nearly monotone, and the “hic” is shorter and slightly higher. As you can hear in the following examples, the sequence is often more like “du, du, du, du, du-hic”. Sometimes the “hic” notes will be given without a “du,” or after other “hics.”
This call may be given primarily by males, but I’m not certain of that. It’s given throughout the breeding season, but especially in long bouts at dawn and dusk during the early summer, prior to egg laying.
Hammond’s Flycatcher: “Peer-pewit”
Quite similar to Dusky’s “du-hic” but not mentioned in any field guides that I know, this call was first described in the scientific literature by James Sedgwick in 1975. Sedgwick called it the “k-lear whee-zee” call, but I think “peer-pewit” is a better transliteration. The “peer” note is slightly more downslurred than Dusky’s “du,” and the “pewit” is higher, longer, and much more distinctly two-syllabled than Dusky’s “hic.” It’s given in similar situations to the “du-hic,” though it’s apparently more likely to be heard later in the breeding season, after egg laying.
Yellow-bellied Flycatcher: “Whit-beert”
I stumbled across this vocalization in a good recording by Randy Little from Herkimer County, New York, which appears to be the only such recording in existence. The call is clearly related to the “du-hic” and “peer-pewit” of the western species, but instead of a drawn-out whistle, the first note is an emphatic “whit!” that resembles a more explosive version of the “whit” calls of other Empids. The second note is again an up-down-up trace on the spectrogram, rather like the Hammond’s “pewit” note.
Yellow-bellied Flycatcher "whit-beert" call, Woodhull Lake, New York, 5/30/1998. ML catalog #106901
(Click here to listen to the original recording on the Macaulay Library website.)
I cannot find any definite mention of the “whit-beert” call of Yellow-bellied Flycatcher in any published source. The only possible reference I’ve found is this brief statement in the Birds of North America account:
One variation of Tu-Wee Call is of longer duration, described as thoo weep eh, thoo weep eh, or she weeps sir (Hausman 1946), or pea-wayk-pea-wayk (Dr. Hoy in Forbush 1927) and may actually represent call of different function.
That’s it. Not much to go on.
So we’re left with more questions than answers. Do other Empids give “two-part calls”? What functions do they serve in each species? Are they ever given by migrants? Are they very rare in the Yellow-bellied Flycatcher, or merely under-reported?
I’d be interested to hear anybody else’s experience with this type of call in Empids.
White-winged Parakeet, 5/25/2012, Miami Shores, Florida. Photo by Andrew Spencer
A couple of years ago I wrote about the importance of recording exotic birds in the places where they’ve been introduced, not just in their native ranges. Recording exotics is important for several reasons, but I put particular emphasis on this one:
Most birds with learned songs are apparently genetically predisposed to pick out the sounds of their own species from the chorus and imitate those, but if they’re first- or second-generation immigrants in an avian Babel, they might not have many, or any, of their own species to learn from. Might the scarcity of conspecific tutors restrict the repertoire size of immigrants? Might it force them to innovate or imitate other species? We don’t really know.
Now, preliminary evidence is pointing toward an answer, and that answer appears to be “yes.” In at least one species, some individuals sound different in their adopted country than do their ancestors back in the homeland.
Yellow-chevroned and White-winged Parakeets in Florida
These two small South American parakeets are closely related — in fact, they were until recently considered a single species, “Canary-winged Parakeet.” They look and sound quite similar, and where both species occur in south Florida, they sometimes hybridize. As a result, their status and distribution in Florida have been somewhat difficult to tease apart. I’ve heard from a couple of sources that White-winged used to be the more common of the two species in south Florida, but has declined in recent years, while Yellow-chevroned has increased.
The vocal differences between these two species have not been well described. Like all parrots, White-winged and Yellow-chevroned Parakeets give complex and varied vocalizations. One common sound from both species is a mellow, musical, multi-syllabic chirp, which averages slightly higher-pitched in Yellow-chevroned:
The more distinctive sound of these species is a noisy chatter. In its native range in South America, the chatter of White-winged is significantly slower, with each individual note clearly audible. The chatter of Yellow-chevroned is much faster, with the notes run together into a continuous churr:
Here’s the rub. In south Florida, at least some of the Yellow-chevroned Parakeets sound quite a bit like White-wingeds:
The differences are subtle, and there are a lot of birds in this recording (it was a roost of over 200 individuals), but the sounds here seem consistently closer to “classic” White-winged than to “classic” Yellow-chevroned, in both the pitch of the chirps and the speed of the chatters. The majority of sounds are intermediate. There might have been a couple of White-wingeds hidden in the flock, but the observers, Andrew Spencer and Carlos Sanchez, didn’t see any White-wingeds or hybrids — only apparently pure Yellow-chevroneds.
It might be that the Yellow-chevroned Parakeets of south Florida have come into contact with White-winged Parakeets and learned some of their vocalizations. I wouldn’t be surprised if parakeets in a flock gradually changed calls to be more like those of their flockmates; similar behavior has been documented in a number of species of cardueline finches. There may also be some mixed ancestry involved, even if none was evident in plumage patterns. It’s hard to say.
What’s clear is that there’s no guarantee that feral exotic birds will sound exactly like their wild ancestors. That’s why it’s important to record them where you find them. Exotics are everywhere: lovebirds in Phoenix, magpie-jays in San Diego, Rose-ringed Parakeets in Bakersfield, Nutmeg Mannikins in Pensacola. It’s time we started paying more attention to what they’re saying.
King Rail, Pike County, Missouri. Photo by Jim Rathert, USFWS (public domain). Click to enlarge
The two largest rails in the United States are so similar in appearance and vocalizations that they have at times been considered a single species. In general the King Rail is a more brightly-colored bird of freshwater marshes, while the Clapper is a duller bird of coastal salt marshes.
But even this statement requires a few caveats. For one thing, Gulf Coast Clappers are brighter than East Coast Clappers, and the disjunct populations of “Light-footed” and “Yuma” Clappers in California and Arizona are brighter still, bright enough to have been considered subspecies of King Rail by some authors. Furthermore, King and Clapper Rails have been known to hybridize in brackish marshes where their ranges meet, spawning the dreaded “Cling Rails” — birds presumably intermediate in all respects, and not safely identified in the field, even when you can see them — which is not very often, for these ghosts of the cattails.
Most of the time, the presence of one of these rails is announced solely by their loud, unmusical calls, leaving us to identify them solely by voice. It isn’t always possible, but today we’ll talk about when and how it can be done.
The “Kek” Series
For humans, this vocalization is about as exciting as listening to a six-year-old incessantly rap a stick against a wooden fence. For female rails, it must be quite an aphrodisiac, because it’s the primary way that males attract mates in early spring. It’s typically heard for a fairly brief period out of the year, and given only rarely after the singer is paired.
Male Kings and male Clappers “sing” with the same notes — the key to identifying them is to listen to the speed of their calls. Here’s a useful snippet from the Sibley Guide to Birds:
a series of unmusical kek notes, slower at beginning and end; the tempo of the fastest portion is useful for species identification. […] Individuals may give faster or slower calls depending on mood, but such departures are usually brief. Long, consistent bouts of typical calls can be reliably identified.
According to Sibley, eastern Clapper Rails “kek” at about 4-5 notes per second, while Kings are slower, usually 2 notes per second. In a careful survey of all the rail recordings I could find online, I found the differences to be consistently smaller than this. I found some very excited Clappers reaching 5 notes per second, but an extended listen to most birds will find them averaging between 3 and 4 notes per second in the fastest parts of their series.
Kings, meanwhile, seem to average between 2 and 3 notes per second.
But even they can get up pretty far into Clapper speed if they feel particularly motivated. I’m assuming this one is safely called a King, since it was recorded just outside Columbus, Ohio:
It’s clear that fast Kings overlap with slow Clappers (or is it that excited Kings overlap with bored Clappers?). However, I agree with Sibley’s basic point: an extended listen to a bird should provide, at least, a good strong clue to its identification.
Grunt Series
You are more likely to hear this vocalization than the “Kek” Series. It’s given by both sexes almost year-round, as a pair contact call and as a way of mediating territorial disputes with other pairs. Any loud noise may set off a Grunt Series, and one grunting rail often sets off another. Mated pairs may perform extended, unsynchronized grunt duets, one starting slightly after the other, in one of nature’s least aesthetically pleasing romantic gestures. These duets tend to go on longer than solo versions, and are less likely to accelerate at the end.
The Grunt Series of the two species, like the “Kek” Series, are made of similar notes and are best distinguished by speed. Again the Clapper is the faster bird, and again I’ve found there to be more overlap between the species than reported in Sibley: Clappers appear to average 4-6 notes per second, while Kings clock in at 3-5 notes per second. This range of overlap is great enough to suggest that only the fastest of Clappers and the slowest of Kings are safely identifiable by this call.
“Kek-burrs”
In the 1980s, Richard Zembal and Barbara Massey were the first to discover the meaning of this sound. They were observing two color-banded pairs of “Light-footed” Clapper Rails in California. One morning, one of the males was killed by a Red-tailed Hawk. Two days later, his mate (#421) began giving the “Kek-burr” call. By that same evening, she had succeeded in stealing the sole remaining male (#443):
From 1723 to 1843 that first evening they clappered [grunted] in duet 12 times and were seen copulating twice. The newly abandoned female, #442, began to kek-burr on the following morning. During that day and the following one, #443 divided his time between the two females. Without the aid of a full-time mate, #421 abandoned her nest. Each of the females, once alone, eventually kek-burred when #443 was with the other one, and #443 responded every time by returning to the calling female, often quickly. We witnessed #443 respond to kek-burring 11 times in 36.1 h of observations over 4 days. During one exchange he traveled the 190 m to the calling female within 18 min of the onset of kek-burring. When another male appeared on the fourth day, #443 returned to #442, #421 settled in with the new arrival making use of the same nest), and kek-burring ceased.
Thus, Zembal and Massey concluded that the “Kek-burr” is the female’s equivalent of the “Kek” Series — her way of advertising a burning urge to mate.
Females of both species give nearly identical “Kek-burr” calls, and I do not know of any way to separate the species by this call. Excited birds may give many rapid “Keks” before the burr; in some situations, the burr is given separately.
Screech
This is the vocalization that Sibley refers to as “a raucous squawk like a startled chicken”. It’s not quite clear what motivates this call, but in both species it varies from a grunt to a squeak, and there do not appear to be any significant differences between the two species’ versions.
Hoot
This rarely-heard call is apparently given by alarmed rails near the nest. There are very few recordings of this sound, but you can hear the hoot of a Clapper Rail here. Meanwhile, this recording at the Macaulay Library may represent the hoot of King Rail, but the bird making the sound was not seen, so it’s not even certain that the sound was made by a rail.
If you can shed any light on the mysterious Macaulay recording from Florida, or on the hooting calls of rails in general, please let me know. If you’ve got recordings, I’d love to hear them.
Update 8/21/12
I just learned about recent research into the King/Clapper Rail complex: a 2012 Ph.D. dissertation by James Maley that not only found a solid genetic distinction between King and Clapper Rails (further demonstrated by this recent paper), but also found that West Coast “Clapper Rails” are part of a distinct lineage that also includes the tenuirostris “King Rails” of central Mexico. All these are separate from the longirostris group in South America. Caribbean birds cluster with North American Clapper Rails.
Thus, it seems there’s a good case not only for keeping King and Clapper Rail separate, but further splitting Clapper Rail into 3 or 4 species. In both proposals, we’d end up with 3 species of large rail in North America: King, “eastern” Clapper, and “western” Clapper. See the recent discussion on BirdForum for a little more info.
Calling male Red-winged Blackbird, 16 May 2009. Photo by jessi.bryan (click for link).
“What does that sound mean?”
“What is that bird saying?”
Questions like these are an important entry point for many people into investigating bird behavior. One moment, they’re simply admiring a song, and the next moment, they’re noticing things — like a sudden switch to Sound B as a hawk flies over.
Once they’ve noticed it, they can hypothesize about it. Maybe Sound B means danger. Maybe the bird is saying, “Look out, there’s a hawk!” Maybe Sound B is the aerial predator alarm call.
When people start drawing inferences like this, they’re taking an important first step towards being investigators of animal behavior — ethologists — rather than mere admirers of it. It’s an exciting and significant moment in the relationship with nature.
But it’s only the first step. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources to take the second step, which is to methodically test whether our hypotheses are correct. If we did, we’d often have to face the fact that we were wrong.
Red-winged Blackbird alarm calls
What does a male Red-winged Blackbird say when a hawk flies over? Well, it could be any of these wildly different sounds:
It could be any of those sounds and a whole lot more. In fact, it’s very difficult to predict what a Red-winged Blackbird will say in response to a hawk.
A budding ethologist might think this a little strange. Doesn’t a huge variety of “aerial predator alarm calls” risk confusion? Any blackbird who doesn’t get the message could be easy prey — so evolution would seem to favor a single alarm response that all members of the species “agree on,” so to speak.
One possible explanation is the existence of local dialects. Perhaps the Redwings in this particular marsh give a high downslurred whistle when a hawk appears, but the Redwings in the next marsh over give a three-noted “ti-ti-ti“. The form of the call might depend on location, just as human alarm calls sound like “look out!” in New York, “pas op!” in Amsterdam, and “abunai!” in Tokyo.
Makes sense. Redwings do have local call dialects. The ones in this marsh do sound different from the ones in that marsh. But even that doesn’t explain the plethora of responses.
In a study published in 1986, Les Beletsky, B.J. Higgins, and Gordon Orians tested the responses of male Red-winged Blackbirds to a stuffed Cooper’s Hawk. They already knew that each Redwing in their study area gave seven different calls, which they called”peet”, “check”, “chuck”, “chick”, “chonk”, “chink”, and “cheer”. They revealed the stuffed hawk to 32 calling male blackbirds, 21 of which quickly switched call types:
One male switched to “peet” upon detecting the hawk, 4 males switched to “check”, 4 switched to “chuck”, 3 switched to “chick”, 2 switched to “chonk”, and 7 switched to “cheer”.
To be clear: all the male blackbirds could give all seven calls. When they saw the hawk, they switched to a different call from the one they had just been giving. But Beletsky et al. realized that which call type they switched to didn’t matter. That’s because it was not the call itself but the change in calls that sent the alarm signal:
Male redwings apparently use call switching as a component of a general alert system. … Individuals shift from one call to another when detecting environmental changes such as the appearance of a predator or the sudden movement of an observer. Even a stone tossed into a male’s territory can elicit from him a call switch and contagious switching around the lake. When detecting a call change by one male, the predominant response of other males is to switch to the same call type. The new type then supercedes the previous one as background, upon which subsequent call switches can be detected and localized, i.e., the system is immediately “reset” to a receptive status, awaiting the next change to impinge upon it.
This alert system is a highly effective one, but it only works in Red-winged Blackbirds because a few specific preconditions are met:
Red-winged Blackbirds nest in dense colonies where many nests are simultaneously vulnerable to the same predator, and communal vigilance benefits the entire group;
Male Redwings are exceptionally vocal, calling nearly continuously throughout the day, rarely stopping for more than a minute at a time;
Individual males have large repertoires of different call types, learned from and shared with neighboring males;
All males are quick to match a neighbor’s new call type right after he switches.
This remarkable behavioral system demonstrates how wrong our anthropomorphic assumptions about communication can be. It’s tempting to think of bird sounds as though they were words and phrases, as though it were always the form of the sound that encoded specific messages to the listener. But that’s not how Red-winged Blackbirds work. In and of themselves, their many “alert calls” may be practically meaningless. Instead, the “meaning” is carried by the relationship of a call to the ones around it in time and space — its position within the larger matrix of calling behaviors.
For me, at least, this study opened up a whole new way of thinking about bird communication.
