Category Archives: Vocalizations

Hard To Find By Voice

Vocalizations
Female northern cardinal (photo by Cris Hamilton)

Even though birds don’t sing in the winter they still make warning calls so a “cheeping” bird should be easy to find, right? Not necessarily.

Some species, like chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches, make sounds that are easy to pinpoint but the calls of others are thin, faint, high notes that are hard to triangulate. Is the bird up or down? To the left or right? In that thicket or the next one?

Here’s a list of winter birds whose warning or contact calls are hard to find. The calls may be insubstantial, but if you recognize the sound you’ll at least know what species is hiding in the bush. (Turn up your speakers.)

Northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis)

First on the list is the northern cardinal, shown above. I often identify the call but can’t find the bird. Here’s the contact call of a female, one of the hardest to find (around 7000 Hz).

White-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis)

White-throated sparrow (photo by Steve Gosser)

This winter visitor, the white-throated sparrow, has a higher pitched warning call than the song sparrow we hear year round. Listen to the white-throated sparrow’s call (4800-5800 Hz) …

… and compare it to a song sparrow’s (Melospiza melodia) lower pitched “vimp” sound (3500-4200 Hz).

Both sparrows use lower, wider frequency ranges than cardinals so they’re easier to find.

Golden-crowned kinglet (Regulus satrapa)

Golden-crowned kinglet (photo by Steve Gosser)

For a really narrow high-pitched frequency you can’t beat the three-note contact call of the golden-crowned kinglet. He’s hard to pinpoint even if you can hear him. Now that I’ve lost my upper range of hearing I rely on friends to tell me when this bird is present. The calls are at 7500-8300 Hertz. Can you hear them? Not I!

Don’t feel bad if you can’t find a bird by its warning or contact call. Even if your hearing is perfect some birds are hiding by voice.

(photos by Cris Hamilton and Steve Gosser, see captions)

American robin, skygazing (photo by Joel Kluger, Creative Commons license via Flickr)
American robin, skygazing (photo by Joel Kluger via Flickr)

p.s. Here’s the call of an American robin that means “Danger From The Air.”

I can’t hear it anymore. Can you?

American robin danger call at 8000 Hertz

The Story of a Starling

Vocalizations

In the spring of 2015, Nature On The Go of Green Oak Twp, Michigan found a baby starling fallen from his nest. Since European starlings are invasive, no rehabber would raise the bird for release into the wild, so Nature On The Go decided to raise the starling as an educational ambassador.

As the starling matured he began to mimic phrases he heard from the people around him. For his role as an Animal Ambassador they taught him phrases that explain how starlings arrived in North America. After all, the starlings’ mimicry is an indirect reason why they were brought here.

Watch the video to hear this startling speak. He’s a “Shakespeare bird.”

(video by Nature On The Go, LLC on YouTube)

Prankster on Camera

Bird Behavior, Vocalizations

Last week Colin Roberts tweeted this video from one of his forest trailcams in southwest Scotland. His cameras record the activities of pine martens but the view is sometimes dominated by another species, the Eurasian jay.

Eurasian jay (photo by Pierre Dalous via Wikimedia Commons)
Eurasian jay (photo by Pierre Dalous via Wikimedia Commons)

Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) are intelligent, curious, and very vocal mimics. This particular jay punctuates his visits with the sounds of a squeaky tree, a tawny owl, and an amazing Star Wars riff.

Then he gets really close to the lens and … oh my!

(tweet and video by Colin Roberts @PinetenColin, photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Visualize Bird Song

Quiz, Vocalizations
Screenshot from Bird Song Hero tutorial (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

Now that the birds are singing again and more singers will arrive on migration, it’s time to practice identifying songs by ear. Yes, it’s hard to do but it’s easier if you can visualize the song.

Just like a sheet of music, a spectrogram of bird song shows how the frequency (pitch) goes up and down. The black dashes graph the frequency and length of the notes. The brown wave graphs loudness in decibels.

Song sparrow spectrogram for Xeno Canto audio XC374118 (audio by Ted Floyd)

Play the matching audio to hear the graph: a song sparrow recorded by Ted Floyd, Xeno Canto XC374118.

This is just one example but you can learn to do it yourself and practice with two quizzes at Cornell Lab’s All About Birds.

  1. Learn how to read the spectrograms that visualize bird song in this video: Bird Song Hero Tutorial.
  2. Two quizzes follow the video or you can try them independently at the Bird Song Hero Challenge. TIP: Watch the sonogram as it plays! Some of them are tricky.

p.s. Did you know that birds sing harmonies we can’t hear? On the song sparrow spectrogram, above, there are tall vertical dashes during the fast part of the song. The bird is harmonizing with himself in the 12,000 HZ frequency. If you’re older than 30-something, you probably can’t hear it.

(screenshot from Bird Song Hero tutorial (Cornell Lab of Ornithology, sonogram and audio from Xeno Canto XC374118 by Ted Floyd)

p.p.s Xeno Canto calls the graphs “sonograms.” It’s an older word for spectrogram. Here’s the difference between “spectrogram” and “sonogram.”

I Can See, But Not Hear Them Singing

Songbirds, Vocalizations

27 March 2019

Can you hear the golden-crowned kinglets in this video? They are very loud but I can’t hear them at all, though I can see their beaks moving. Their voices are at a high frequency I no longer hear.

All About Birds explains:

Golden-crowned kinglet (photo by Steve Gosser)

Golden-crowned kinglets sing an ascending, accelerating series of up to 14 very high-pitched tsee notes lasting up to 3 seconds and sometimes ending in a musical warble that drops an octave or more in pitch. This is one of the first bird songs that people stop being able to hear as they age. 

All About Birds, Golden-crowned kinglet sounds

If you can’t hear the kinglets you are probably over age 65, perhaps younger, and probably have age-related hearing loss. Presbycusis affects 1 out of 3 of people by age 65 and half of us by age 75. The CDC explains that “the most important sounds we hear every day are in the 250 to 6,000 Hz range.” Kinglets vocalize around 8,000 HZ.

What are HZ? Sounds cause vibrations and are measured in vibrations per second: 1 Hertz (HZ) is 1 vibration/second. High-pitched sounds vibrate faster than low pitched sounds so “high pitch” is also “high frequency.”

At birth humans can hear sounds from about 20 to 20,000 HZ but we start losing our upper range of hearing at age 18! Most of us don’t miss sounds above 17,000HZ but some teenagers in the UK will. They capitalized on the age-related hearing difference by creating a “mosquito whine” ringtone that teachers cannot hear. See and hear it on NPR.

The kinglets in the video are vocalizing at 7700 to 8400 HZ as shown in this graph from the Spectroid app on my mobile phone. The pink scale at the bottom shows the kinglets singing in the 8000 HZ area (at right) and my voice below 5000 HZ (long pink lines on the left). (Top graph shows loudness in decibels.)

So now I have two ways to see golden-crowned kinglets singing. I can watch their beaks or I can watch the Spectroid graph on my mobile phone.

Perhaps if I point my cellphone in the woods I’d see if any golden-crowned kinglets are out there.

p.s. Click here for a video that explains age-related hearing loss & helps you answer the question “How Old Are Your Ears?“

(photo of golden-crowned kinglet by Steve Gosser, Spectroid graph recorded by Kate St. John; video by The Wood Thrush Shop on YouTube)

Identifying Bird Song: You Know More Than You Think

Vocalizations
Eastern phoebe, Schenley Park, 27 May 2018 (photo by Peter Bell)
Eastern phoebe, Schenley Park, 27 May 2018 (photo by Peter Bell)

After months of silence, spring is coming and the birds are singing again. It’s the best time of year to practice identifying birds by song.

No matter your skill level there’s always more to learn. If you’re an expert, it’s time to practice songs heard only once a year during spring migration. (Cape May warbler!)

If you’re new to bird song you probably think, “It’s so hard to learn bird song. I don’t know anything!”

Here are two hot tips to help birders at any level.

Tip #1: You’ll learn the song better if you see the bird singing. We humans are visual learners. Look for the unknown singer and watch him sing.

The eastern phoebe pictured above looks plain but he’s easy to identify by song because he says his name: FEE bee! FEE bee! The author of the video below went looking for the bird to watch him sing. It’s a bit seasick-making 😉

Tip #2: Keep at it! You already know some bird songs. Just build from there, one bird at a time.

Here are three birds most people can identify. I bet you can, too.

Bird #1 (Xeno Canto 454252, recorded in Norfolk County, MA by Will Sweet)

Bird #2 (Xeno Canto 421264, recorded in Tompkins County, NY by Gabriel Leite)

Bird #3 (Xeno Canto 399153, recorded in Harrison Hills Park, Allegheny County, PA by Aidan Place) This recording is faint so you may have to turn up the sound … and hear it raining.

You already know more than you think.

(photo of eastern phoebe by Peter Bell. Xeno Canto recordings identified and linked in the captions above)

Tell Me Who’s Singing

Songbirds, Vocalizations
Ovenbird singing (photo by Aaron Budgor on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

11 March 2019

Have you ever wished for a tool that could accurately count a single bird’s voice among dozens of singers? You aren’t alone. Ornithologists are eager for a way to census birds using field recordings, but the sheer volume of data and complexity of bird song makes this a daunting task. A free tool that can identify huge volumes of song data doesn’t exist yet, but the Kitzes Lab at the University of Pittsburgh is creating one.

In December 2018 Assistant Professor Justin Kitzes of the Department of Biological Sciences won an AI for Earth Innovation Grant, awarded by Microsoft and National Geographic, to develop the first free open source model for identifying bird songs in acoustic field recordings. Its name is OpenSoundscape.

OpenSoundscape uses machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), to scan recorded birdsong and algorithmic hunches to arrive at a song’s identity. To do this the Kitzes Lab starts with real life recordings.

The team places small AudioMoth recorders in an array in the forest, much the same way human observers do point counts except that the Audio Moths are all recording at the same time.

Audio Moth in the field(photo courtesy Kitzes Lab)

The team brings the recorders back to the lab and downloads the sound files to the database. (Some day the software will be able to triangulate GPS from several Audio Moths and determine a single songbird’s location!)

AudioMoth recorder used by field study at Kitzes Lab (photo by Kate St. John)

Here’s one recording of at least six individual birds. OpenSoundscape is learning how to identify them.

An Audio Moth recording from the field (courtesy Kitzes Lab)

It makes a spectrogram of the sound file (below), then picks out each pattern and uses algorithms and the classifier library to identify the individual songs.

The more songs it successfully identifies, the better its algorithms become.

By the end of 2019 the OpenSoundscape models, software, and classifier library of birdsong will be ready for researchers on a laptop, cloud service or supercomputer. Ornithologists will be able to gather tons of data in the field and find out who was singing.

p.s. WESA featured this project in their Tech Report on 26 Feb 2019. Click here to listen.

(credits: photo of ovenbird by Aaron Budgor on Flickr, Creative Commons license. Photo of Audio Moth on a desk by Kate St. John. All other photos and sound file, courtesy the Kitzes Lab)

Backyard Bird Sings Beethoven

Songbirds, Vocalizations
Drawing by C.F.K. Klober, 1818 (Wikimedia Commons)

16 December 2018

Today is Beethoven’s 248th birthday.

To celebrate, here’s the soundtrack of a backyard bird singing the first notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.  (Song begins at 8 seconds; bird is not visible.)

Here’s an orchestra playing the same four notes.

Beethoven would not have known the song sparrow, whose range is limited to North America, but this song sparrow knows Beethoven.

(drawing and audio from Wikimedia Commons; video by Christina M. Rau on YouTube)

A Sound That Reminds Me of Home

Travel, Vocalizations
Rufous piha (photo by Amy E. McAndrews on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Last March while birding along Panama’s Pipeline Road we heard a sound that reminded me of home. 

The bird was loud and its sound was tropical — not a Pennsylvania bird — but something about it seemed familiar.

Here’s what we heard:

Rufous piha (audio from Xeno Canto XC107022)

Our guide identified it as the rufous piha (Lipaugus unirufus) a member of the Cotinga family.

So why was his song familiar?  

I used to hear a similar sound in the Wetlands Room at the National Aviary. The sound is gone now — the bird passed away — but for many years his voice defined that room.

Screaming piha (audio from Xeno Canto, XC444908)

The screaming piha (Lipaugus vociferans) is a member of the Cotinga family native to the Amazon. The bird looks boring but his voice is not.

Screaming piha (photo by Dick Daniels via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s too bad he’s no longer with us at the National Aviary.  His voice from the Amazon reminds me of Pittsburgh.

(photo of rufous piha by Amy E. McAndrews on Flickr, Creative Commons license; photo of screaming piha from Wikimedia Commons; audio from Xeno Canto. Click on the captions to see the originals.)

Raven Gets Creative

Crows & Ravens, Vocalizations

Crows are common in the city but ravens are rare so I was surprised to hear a raven this week in Schenley Park.  It called and circled overhead waiting for its companion to arrive. “Brrrock! Brrrock!”  When the second raven caught up they flew away together.

I see ravens in town about twice a year but I only hear them make the Brrrock call.  If I lived where common ravens (Corvus corax) are common, I’d hear their wide variety of sounds.

This video from Anchorage, Alaska gives you an idea of the ravens’ vocal range.  He starts with Brrrock.   Then he gets creative.

(video by dougbrown47 on YouTube)