Ever wondered what a Dodo sounded like? Or a Great Auk? Or a Kaua’i ‘O’o?
On a whim, I went looking for sounds of extinct birds on the internet, and I found a lot more than I bargained for — in more ways than one. I managed to turn up some of the rarest, most remarkable, saddest and most haunting recordings I’ve ever heard…and also some of the looniest.
Lesson two is up! Enjoy!
I’ve just posted the first part of my online tutorial on how to read spectrograms. Lesson One deals with Pitch and Inflection. More lessons to follow; all will be permanently available through the menu bar. Let me know what you think!
Today Matt Young told me about David Sibley’s recent post on vocal mimicry in Pine Siskins. The surprise to me (and to Sibley and others) was not that Pine Siskins infringe on other birds’ copyrights, but rather that this fact had gone unreported in the literature for so long. Actually it hadn’t just gone unreported; it had been refuted.
In the middle of the afternoon a few weeks ago I was sitting in the public library in Sierra Vista, Arizona–a wonderful facility, by the way–escaping the heat of the day to download my bird sound recordings, recharge my batteries, and check my email, when my attention was drawn to a bird hopping directly toward me on the ground.
Since meadowlarks learn their songs but not their calls (i.e., their calls are genetically determined), in theory, any significant differences between their calls might provide evidence that they should be split at the species level. The Birds of North America account claims that Lilian’s and Eastern calls are similar, and indeed they are–but there might be some perceptible differences too, as we shall see.
My friend Walter just sent me a link to Paul Driver’s excellent bird song blog. I searched the web for other bird song blogs before I started mine, but I certainly missed this one! According to his brief bio on Xeno-Canto, Paul is British by origin but now lives in the Philadelphia area. I highly recommend a visit to his site.
Interest in “Lilian’s” Meadowlark has spiked with the publication of Barker et al. (2008), which found significant genetic differences between Lilian’s and other “Eastern” Meadowlarks and recommended that Lilian’s be elevated to species status. Can “Lilian’s” be told from “Eastern” by song? In this post, we find out.
I think most birders know by now that Red Crossbills in North America sort into a number of different call types, each of which may constitute a cryptic species. Identifying these types in the field promises to be a bugaboo of legendary proportions. Where does one begin?
In this post I’ve collected links to some online resources that can get you started: a sort of Crossbill Q & A, if you will.