Do Bushtits Sing?
Of late, I’ve had occasion to question the conventional wisdom that Bushtits do not sing.
The Toughest Birds to Record in North America
But ask a recordist about the toughest birds in the ABA area and you’ll get a very different list. Most of the species that I talk about below aren’t really “hard” birds to see. Some of them can be downright common in the right areas. But what makes a bird hard to record can be quite different than what makes it hard to find.
Bohemian Rhapsody
Waxwings have some of the simplest repertoires of all passerines, with no true “song”, or at least none that has been documented. And even their calls are typically variations on the same trill. Or so I thought.
More Than Just a Mudsucker
What was once a bird that made just a few simple, short chips or churrs suddenly has a large and varied repertoire that includes complicated aerial acrobatics and sounds as varied as low-pitched hooting to amazingly insect-like twittering. The first time I stood out on the tundra in Alaska I was blown away by everything I was seeing and hearing, and I’ve never looked at shorebirds the same way again.
How to Identify a Timberline Sparrow
On the field marks and audio cues that separate nominate Brewer’s Sparrows from the “Timberline” subspecies.
Common vs. Chihuahuan Ravens
I’m starting to think that voice is actually a very good character — maybe the best field character — for separating these two species.
Florida’s Online Sound Archive
The Florida Museum of Natural History has put its huge collection of bird sound recordings online in digital format for the first time.
Describing Variation in Bird Sounds
Bird sounds vary on many levels. When talking about variation, it would be nice to be able to distinguish exactly which kind of variation we mean.
A Bicknell’s Thrush Critique
In 1995, in the 40th Supplement to their checklist, the American Ornithologists’ Union recognized Bicknell’s Thrush (Catharus bicknelli) as a full species, splitting it from the Gray-cheeked Thrush (Catharus minimus) on the basis of “differences in morphology, vocalizations, habitat preferences, and migration patterns.” In this post, I reassess the evidence for a consistent difference in flight calls between Bicknell’s and Gray-cheeked Thrushes.
The Seven Basic Tone Qualities
Tone quality is the distinctive voice of a sound — the thing that allows you to tell the difference between a violin and a trumpet when they’re both playing the same note. It comes in very handy when identifying birds by sound, but people have tended to differ in their notions of how to describe it. Today we’ll introduce basic tone quality vocabulary.