{"id":945,"date":"2009-10-26T10:29:07","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T16:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/?p=945"},"modified":"2016-11-25T08:49:56","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T14:49:56","slug":"the-alternate-song-of-prothonotary-warbler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/archives\/945","title":{"rendered":"The Alternate Song of Prothonotary Warbler"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Prothonotary<\/a>
Prothonotary Warbler, Chatham-Kent, Ontario, 5\/4\/2008. Photo by Gavan Watson (Creative Commons 2.0).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They don’t call it the Golden Swamp Warbler anymore, but name would still be apt, because the flame-yellow Prothonotary is a familiar sight in the swampy areas of southeastern North America.\u00a0 It’s a wonderful and evocative bird, one that even non-birders tend to notice when it perches or sings nearby.\u00a0 It’s one of the few warblers that nests in cavities, and it is the sole member of the genus Protonotaria<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In 2006, I joined a volunteer team in Cornell’s search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the White River National Wildlife Refuge of Arkansas.\u00a0 During the two weeks I spent walking around in the untrammeled, uncampephiled wilderness, I had many spectacular close-up encounters with wildlife, but the most amazing was with a male Prothonotary Warbler.\u00a0 I was standing in hardwoods on the edge of a flooded swamp when the golden bird popped up over the water and began to sing.\u00a0 I switched on my microphone to record it, and suddenly it flew into a leafless sapling right over my head.\u00a0 I didn’t dare breath or move; I just kept the microphone running, hoping the bird would stay in the tree, hoping it would sing again.\u00a0 Sure enough, after a few minutes of foraging it began to belt out its familiar primary song: a fast monotone series of high clear upslurred whistles, not particularly musical, often transcribed as “sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet.”<\/p>\n

\"Prothonotary<\/a>
Prothonotary Warbler primary song, Phillips County, Arkansas, 4\/4\/2006.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/prows1str2-ndp2006-12-18.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

But then the bird did something even more extraordinary.\u00a0 It began to sing another song, one that was so faint that if the bird hadn’t been within five meters of me, I surely wouldn’t have heard it.\u00a0 And it was like nothing I’d ever heard from a Prothonotary before:<\/p>\n

\"Alternate<\/a>
Alternate song of Prothonotary Warbler (same individual as above). Note that the song has three parts in a strict syntax AAAABBBBBBBCCC. The four calls at the end were not part of the song structure; I only heard such calls a few times, usually right before or after a song strophe. They appear to correspond to the typical flight call of the species, as recorded by Evans & O'Brien (2002).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/prowalts1str-ndp2006-12-18.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

I went to the literature to find out what I had recorded, and discovered this in Lisa J. Petit’s Birds of North America account<\/a> (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n

Second, less frequent song is sung primarily during interactions with females, often in aerial Flight Display. This extended song (Spector 1992) is longer and slightly more complex than primary song, beginning rapidly and slowing down at end: chwee-chwee-chwee- chwee, teer, teer, teer<\/em> (LJP) or che-wee-che-wee-chee-chee, chee-chee-che-wee-che-wee <\/em>(Walkinshaw 1979). Brewster (1878) described this song as resembling song of Canary (Serinus canaria<\/em>), sung quietly, and consisting of “trills or water-notes interspersed.” Roberts (1899) referred to the song as beginning with the “usual rapid monotone” and ending with a “varied warble.” No sonograms of this song are known to exist.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“No sonograms known to exist,” of course, is the same thing as saying “no recordings known to exist.”\u00a0 Well, we fixed that, didn’t we?<\/p>\n

Or did we?\u00a0 Upon reflection, the quote above demonstrates some of the difficulties inherent in trying to match old voice descriptions with modern recordings.\u00a0 Is this really the “alternate” song of males?\u00a0 After all, no female was present, and the bird wasn’t singing in flight.\u00a0 Could it be some other type of song?\u00a0 In her account, Petit also mentions two other potential candidate vocalizations, apparent juvenile subsong and female song:<\/p>\n

Two separate observations by LJP during Jul 1985 of immature birds (sexes unknown, both in femalelike plumage-one color-banded, 45 d old; the other unbanded, assumed immature on basis of behavioral interactions with adult pair) singing quiet, raspy, oriolelike warble that did not resemble primary song of adults. Songs were 2-3 s long and were repeated 3-4 times. In Jun 1987, an unbanded female (apparently adult, since it was building nest) was heard to give same type of song, repeated 3 times.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not sure how female song fits into the picture, or whether some of the observers cited in the first quote might have been describing it, but one thing is clear: What I recorded was not subsong.\u00a0 Subsong is given by juvenile birds between fall and spring as they practice for their big debut on a breeding territory.\u00a0 It’s poorly structured, with individual notes randomly mixed and rarely repeated, or repeated in garbled form.\u00a0 The song I recorded, on the other hand, was crystallized: the bird repeated it more than a dozen times, and each time it followed the exact same syntax pattern, with small variations in the exact number of notes A, B, and C, but absolutely no variation in their order, fine structure, or rate of delivery.<\/p>\n

Many warblers have complex alternate songs.\u00a0 Some better-known examples include the “flight songs” of Ovenbird <\/a>and Common Yellowthroat (for the latter, listen here<\/a>, between the 21 and 24 second marks).\u00a0 Paul Driver’s got a neat recording of the extended song of Worm-eating Warbler<\/a>, and Andrew Spencer has posted to Xeno-Canto what may be an alternate song of Black-and-White Warbler<\/a>, although it may also be a type of call.\u00a0 Many of these song types are rarely heard and even more rarely recorded, so I’d love to hear of more examples.<\/p>\n

Given that Prothonotary Warbler has attracted a good deal of research attention over the years, I would be surprised if nobody else had recorded the alternate song by now.\u00a0 If you have any information to share, please let me know<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s probably worth writing up a note for publication in a journal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the two weeks I spent walking around in the White River National Wildlife Refuge in 2006, I had many spectacular close-up encounters with wildlife, but the most amazing was with a male Prothonotary Warbler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,4,82],"tags":[80,81],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flight-calls","category-id","category-subsong","tag-prothonotary-warbler","tag-protonotaria-citrea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5100,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/5100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}