More on the Mystery Empid Call

A few months ago I wrote about a mysterious new “whit-beert” call that I took to be a previously undescribed sound of Yellow-bellied Flycatcher. Now, new information has come to light that calls my earlier conclusions into question. [Read more]

The “Tink” Call

Many species of warbler and sparrow give high, sharp “tink” notes that seem worth of their own category, separate from the “call” and the “flight call.” [Read more]

Learning Laplands

In trying to catalog Lapland Longspur calls, I ended up making a map of variation. [Read more]

The Visual Power of GIFs

Ornithologists use the term variety to describe the pattern of delivery of a bird song over time. In the field, it can take many minutes of listening to determine a bird’s pattern. Animated GIFs of spectrograms can condense all this listening into just a few seconds of looping video: [Read more]

What’s Weird About Rusty Blackbirds

Several authors have described Rusty Blackbirds as having two types of songs. However, I came to the conclusion that I was hearing three different types of songs from the species, not two. Or is that two types of song and a very song-like call? [Read more]

The Dawn Song of Brown Creeper

If you had asked me six months ago whether Brown Creeper had a distinctive dawn song, I would have told you no. But as a matter of fact, it does. [Read more]

Video Library: Large Gulls

The internet is full of wild bird videos. If you want to learn about the behavior and vocalizations, it can be a great place to start, at least for certain species. Gulls are a terrific example. [Read more]

What Gulls Say

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. When it comes to identifying a mystery gull, they look at everything; they ignore nothing. Except vocalizations. [Read more]

The Left-handed Blackbird

What bird species always twists its head to the left when singing, never to the right? [Read more]

The “Two-part Calls” of Empidonax

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. [Read more]