Well, it was bound to happen. Sooner or later you knew I was going to introduce my fanatical obsession with birds into this blog series. Well, you can relax because the waiting is over. Today’s Music vs. Monday post focuses on my winged friends. (You have to call them your friends in order to achieve supreme nerdiness.)
Bird songs and birds calls have always been interesting to me. Partially because I want to know what the birds are saying but mainly because I find their singing voices to be quite astounding and so unique in the natural world. Take the mockingbird, a member of the Mimid family, who will sing all day long and into the night and whose song consists of hundreds of other bird songs. I used to think I could sit and count each separate song the mockingbird covered, like I was listening to a radio station. In my best efforts, I was only able to recognize about twenty calls and the bird just kept singing. At the time, I was upset that I didn’t think to record the entire performance and was recently reminded that the tools for doing such a thing are always available and getting more advanced.
In a recent newsletter from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, readers received a link to an article detailing a few tips for making home recordings of birds. Granted, not everyone has a shotgun microphone lying around the house, but if you want to expand your repertoire of sound collections and learn the basics you can take the Macaulay Library’s Sound Recording Workshop which is offered in the summer each year. (In the meantime and while you are saving up money for that course, you can at least be entertained by their main site which features recordings of all types of animal sounds and, yes, even mountain lions.) I have not taken the sound recording workshop, however I have attempted to record various sounds on my iPhone. Unsuccessfully. So I leave that to the experts.
Speaking of the iPhone, as far as pre-recorded bird songs are concerned, I have been surprisingly pleased with my Ibird app. At first I thought, "Do I really want to carry this phone around in the woods?" And then I tried out the birdsong features and I was hooked. For someone who spent every summer evening of his childhood waiting for the haunting sounds of the whippoorwill to drift down the mountain side, it’s a quick way for me to close my eyes, press play, and go back to the woods. And when I’m not using the app to reminisce, I use it to call other birds. Some call it cheating; using a fake bird to call another bird closer just for sole purpose of my own entertainment does seem rude. However, I consider myself an amateur scientist at the very least and am doing my best to promote the livelihood of these creatures through my education and artwork so hopefully I can let myself off the hook.
Since this post is about bird songs and before I get off-topic, I want to interject a little minor educational tidbit and mention that all birds have different songs and different calls. Even those birds in the same family sing differently. Some birds, when displaced over various regions of the US, will have almost foreign sounds even if they are the same bird species. A robin in Virginia might sound totally different from a robin in Illinois. And so that makes these bird applications and birdsong books seem all the more challenging. First, you have to know whether the bird is singing or calling. The main difference is that the song will sound more musical. If you find yourself being lulled into a state of woodsy euphoria, it’s probably a ‘song’. The bird ‘call’, on the other hand, is usually shorter and will give information to other birds in the area like "hey, check out this jackass with the recording equipment” or “There’s a bunch of food over here, so come hang out with me and grab a snack.” I should mention here that these quotes are poor representations of the (most likely) advanced vocabulary of birds, and so my apologies to those who are offended.
For those interested in pursuing the songs of birds, whether for recording purposes or just to learn more, the best sites I have found are as follows. These are second only to actually getting outside and hearing them for yourself, or course!
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