Bird Experiences, Part 1: Listening

It is a pleasure for me to be around birds—to experience their many fascinating ways. Those experiences, as I ponder them, come primarily through two senses: seeing and listening. The principal sense is visual: watching their many antics. I’ll address that next time, but for now I’d like to focus on the secondary—but not least—sense: listening.

Field guides can be crucial in visually identifying and learning about birds, but recorded birds calls are essential for figuring out what one hears. And learning the calls of some species may be the only way to know they’re around, since the shy ones may never be seen. I’ll divide the calls into three categories: the simple, moderate, and complex callers.

I use the term “simple,” both to describe the quality of the call, and also because they’re pretty simple to identify. Once you’ve heard the whippoorwill’s onomatopoeic call (same sound as their name), you’ll never confuse it with any other bird. Other types of birds with imitative names that we have are the phoebe and pewee—close cousins to one another. You can guess how their call sounds.

The simple song of the titmouse is easy to copy with a whistle (the only bird call I can replicate this way). I love to tease a male titmouse by imitating his call. He’ll fly in my direction, looking for his competitor—never able to grasp that the big hominid on the ground is toying with him.

Other simple callers are hawks (an intimidating screech), the melancholy calls of the mourning dove (“oo AHH cooo coo coo”), the barred owl (“hoo hoo ho-ho, hoo hoo ho-hoooooaawr”), and the screech owl (a haunting, whinnying tremolo). (The “hoo” and “coo” sounds are courtesy of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds.)

Skipping to the complex callers, there’s no way of adequately describing their songs—they’re just too intricate. I’ve written before (7/19/08) of the wood thrush and its incredibly musical call. Our other local virtuoso is the indigo bunting. His call is a rapid, random-seeming sequence of notes—almost like an accomplished flute player warming up. It took me many months to identify this bird, as it is very shy and nondescript looking, and by the time I could get the bird call CD out, I’d forgotten his intricate call.

Finally the callers in the middle: singing out with neither a simple melody nor a complicated one—but still too much for me to be able to copy with my puckered lips. These birds fill out the local avian chorus—sort of like altos and baritones in a human choir. Cardinals, robins, and Carolina wrens all have roughly similar calls, all are very melodic. Goldfinches sing out with a nonstop twitter and tweet, like a coffee klatch gossip group. Then there are the distinctive woodpeckers—pileated, hairy, downy, and red-bellied. They all utter a brief squawk, a loud drumming on a hollow limb, or a cackle—the latter as if they were splitting their sides after hearing a great joke. (Remember Woody Woodpecker?)

Yes, listening to birds is fascinating, but nothing quite matches watching the flash of colorful wings. About that next time.