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. [Read more]
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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. [Read more] It’s a commonly held conception that only male birds sing. But the Canyon Wren is an exception. [Read more] It’s difficult to take your camera to a local park and capture a bird plumage or behavior that has never before been photographed. But it’s about twenty times easier to make an audio recording of a call or behavior that has never before been audio recorded. And finding out what kind of sound you’ve recorded takes real detective work. [Read more] All chickadee species give “chick-a-dee” calls, but only three of them — Black-capped, Carolina, and Mountain — have whistled songs. An often-overlooked chickadee vocalization called the gargle may actually fulfill more of the traditional “song” functions than the whistled songs. [Read more] On May 8th, 2011, Andrew Davis and Tim Davis found a Rufous-collared Sparrow, a Central and South American species, in Georgetown, Colorado. When I heard reports that the Georgetown sparrow was singing loudly and often, I immediately wondered whether it might be possible to use its song dialects to pinpoint its birthplace. [Read more] Both subsongs and whisper songs are fascinating, but they are not the same thing. Let’s look at the similarities and differences. [Read more] The American Robin may be the most familiar bird in North America, but for all its abundance and approachability, it remains in some ways inscrutable. [Read more] Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about stereotype. Not the racial or ethnic kind, but the degree to which a bird’s song is the same each time it’s sung. Are there any birds that sing non-stereotyped songs? [Read more] A while back, I asked in a blog post whether Violet-green Swallows sing — and I answered that they do, because they produce complex repeating strings of stereotyped syllables. Now it’s time to ask the same question of the poor, misunderstood Evening Grosbeak. [Read more] I was astonished to find that the current scientific literature says that Violet-green Swallows don’t sing at all. It struck me as unlikely, so I went looking through my collection of Violet-green Swallow recordings. [Read more] |
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