At this time of year I often hear a single bird asking this question: “Beer Bee?”
It’s a call of the American goldfinch.
Click to learn what it means … “Beer Bee“
(photo by Chuck Tague)
Beer Bee?
Category Archives: Vocalizations
What’s That Sound? Cicadas
What’s that sound? In July the birds stop singing and the bugs begin. Some sing during the day, others at night. We usually don’t see what’s making the noise but sometimes we can identify the bugs by song. Here’s a group of insects that are fairly easy to figure out.
Cicadas sing during the day and they are loud. Some songs are so unique that you can identify the bug if you know what to listen for.
Here are audio descriptions for five common species of annual(*) cicadas in southwestern Pennsylvania in order of “most likely to hear/notice,” at least in my experience.
As with birds, pay attention to the habitat where you hear a cicada. Swamp cicadas, for example, are only found in swamps or marshes.
- Scissor grinder cicada (Neotibicen winnemanna in the eastern U.S.). Easiest sound to identify.
- Song: a repetitive WEEE ah, WEEE ah, WEEE ah, WEEE ah, tapers at end
- When? may begin in late morning, but sings the most at dusk
- Where? deciduous forest, city woodlots, parks
- Click here to hear Scissor grinder cicada at songsofinsects.com
- Linne’s cicada (Neotibicen linnei)
- Song: burry rattle, sort of hissy, tapers at end. Songsofinsects describes it as “rattling like a salt shaker.”
- When? all day long in warm weather
- Where? deciduous forest, city parks, woodlots
- Click here to hear Linne’s cicada at songsofinsects.com
- Lyric cicada (Neotibicen lyricen)
- Song: a constant burry puttering drone. It doesn’t taper at the end.
- When? all day long in warm weather, but sings the most at dusk
- Where? deciduous forests, wooded residential areas, orchards
- Click here to hear Lyric cicada at songsofinsects.com
- Dog Day Cicada (Neotibicen canicularis) This is the sound of a hot day in Maine.
- Song: wiry drone on the same pitch, tapers at end. Sounds like a high-pitched buzz-saw
- When? in the heat of the day
- Where? the most northern species, likes pine trees.
- Click here to hear Dog Day Cicada at songsofinsects.com
- Swamp cicada (Neotibicen tibicen tibicen)
- Song: burry, rattling, very rapid “wappa wappa wappa wappa” with rich round background sound that rises and falls in pitch from start to end
- When? early morning until noon
- Where? found only in swamps and marshes
- Click here to hear Swamp cicada at songsofinsects.com
Identifying cicada songs are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sounds of bugs. There are an amazing number of vocal bugs including crickets, katydids and grasshoppers.
Have you heard a bug you can’t identify? Click here for the Songs of Insects guide to common insect species and their sounds. There are 80 species on this page!
(photo by Dana Nesiti)
p.s. Annual(*) cicadas have a life cycle of 2-5 years but they seem “annual” because some individuals in each species reach adulthood every year (i.e. the species appears annually).
p.p.s There aren’t many scissor-grinders in my neighborhood this year. I wonder if they had a bad reproductive year the last time this brood was above ground. How long do scissor-grinders take to reach adulthood? If it’s 5 years then that’d be 2012, a very hot year. Hmmm.
We’ll Stop Singing Soon
This week I noticed that the birds aren’t singing as much as they did a month ago. Song sparrows and American robins are vocal but Baltimore orioles and rose-breasted grosbeaks have fallen silent.
Gray catbirds have been on and off. They sang all spring but were quiet in mid-June. This week they began singing again. Birds of North America online told me why.
Gray catbirds sing from the moment they return in the spring until late in incubation, then become quiet when the eggs hatch and young are in the nest. Their first brood fledged in mid June and now, in late June, they’re nest-building and incubating their second brood. That’s why they’re singing again, though not as often.
Other birds have never stopped. Northern mockingbird “lonely bachelors” are still singing all night. John Bauman heard this one outside his window at 1:30am Friday morning!
By mid-July most birds will stop singing.
Maybe the midnight mockingbird will take the hint but it’s possible he’ll continue into August. Yikes!
(photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)
The Most Beautiful Song on Earth
16 June 2017
I used to think that the wood thrush had the best song of all North American birds until I stood on a trail in north central Michigan this week surrounded by singing hermit thrushes. What a privilege to hear them!
If you’ve never experienced their ethereal song, don’t put off the experience for two decades as I did. Hermit thrushes (Catharus guttatus) nest on the ground in coniferous or mixed northern forests. As our climate warms their preferred habitat will be disappear from the eastern U.S. By 2050 their eastern breeding range will move north into Canada at Hudson Bay.
Listen now to the most beautiful song on earth.
(video of a hermit thrush in Maine by Wild Bird Videos by McElroy Productions on YouTube)
Your Wizard For Identifying Birds
What bird is that?
There’s a small brown bird at the feeder and there’s no one to help you identify it.
Don’t you wish you had a personal assistant to help you?
Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s free Merlin Bird ID app for Android and iPhone does just that. Introduced in 2014, the app gets smarter every year. It uses the simple information you already know — your location, the date and the words “small,” “brown,” and “at the bird feeder” — to narrow your choices and identify the bird.
You can even take a picture with your cellphone and ask Merlin what it is.
Merlin’s answer is a list of the most likely suspects with photos, sounds and descriptions. It even tells you if the bird is uncommon or rare for your date and location. That’s one of the best clues you’ll find anywhere because an “uncommon” species in March can become “common” in May.
Watch the video below to see how Merlin works, then download the app.
Merlin’s a wizard at identifying birds!
p.s. What birds are at Marcy Cunkelman’s feeder shown above? She took the photo in Indiana County, PA, in early February 2014.
(bird photo by Marcy Cunkelman, Merlin Bird ID screenshot and video from Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
The Cardinal’s Song
Even though the weather’s extra cold this week, northern cardinals are singing for Spring.
Learn about their song and the amazing way they produce it in this three-minute video from Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
(video from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology YouTube channel)
Vaudeville Gulls
It’s Vaudeville time with duets of gulls singing and dancing.
Above, two yellow-legged gulls (Larus michahellis) sing in Europe.
Below, European herring gulls (Larus argentatus) dance in Penzance, UK.
Their acts are serious business. Gulls sing when they’re courting and dance for their dinner.
You’ll hear lots of gulls singing in the months ahead as they enter the breeding season.
But you’ll be lucky if you find a dancing gull. In Europe gulls stamp on the ground to bring worms to the surface. I’ve never seen them do it in North America. Have you?
p.s. I guessed at the identity of the dancing gulls. If you know they’re not herring gulls, please tell me what they are.
(videos from YouTube)
The Falcon’s Laugh
27 February 2017
On my trip to Costa Rica I wanted to see a laughing falcon. And then I wanted to hear it.
Laughing falcons (Herpetotheres cachinnans) are very vocal birds that live in Central and South America from Mexico to northern Argentina. They specialize in eating snakes — even poisonous ones — which they kill by biting off the heads. Ch’ol Maya legend says the birds can cure themselves of snake bites. And yet, the birds sound spooky.
At dusk laughing falcons raise their voices in advertisement calls or duets. They start with a gwa call, getting louder and louder, that usually morphs into two syllables: gwa co.
One evening before dinner at Las Cruces Biological Station, Bert Dudley filmed this laughing falcon warming up at dusk.
The two-syllable call gave the bird its common name, halcón guaco, but those calls don’t sound like laughing.
Here is his laugh:
The falcon only laughs when he’s worried or upset.
(photo and video by Bert Dudley)
Who’s Singing Now?
The birds are singing again and our ears are “rusty” after six months of their silence. How can we identify them?
Here are YouTube videos for four species singing in my Pittsburgh neighborhood this morning. Perhaps they’re in your neighborhood, too.
- Song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) get back in tune very early in the year. They’re resident throughout much of North America so they begin practicing in January. By now they’re doing the territorial call-and-response in Pittsburgh. In the video above, you can hear a song sparrow off camera before the one in view responds.
- Carolina wrens (Thryothorus ludovicianus) are LOUD. Resident in the eastern U.S., their song is described as “TEAkettle, TEAkettle, TEAkettle” but it doesn’t always sound like that. Often the best clue to identifying this wren is that it’s the loudest voice you hear. Watch him sing below, then look for your local wren on a prominent perch. You’ll be surprised by how far away he is.
- House finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) were originally from the western U.S. and Mexico but bird sellers illegally captured and sold them as “Hollywood Finches” in New York City. In 1940, with law enforcement in pursuit, the dealers released their birds in Central Park. Since then, the eastern population has expanded westward, nearly meeting up with their western relatives. You probably have one singing in your neighborhood. Listen to him below.
- The mourning dove’s (Zenaida macroura) “whoooing” song is sometimes mistaken for an owl but when you look for the source you’ll find this bird puffing his throat. Mourning doves are tuning up near you. They’re resident in most of the U.S. and Mexico.
(videos from YouTube. Click on the “Watch on YouTube” icon to see each video with explanatory text)
Monkeys And Macaws
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On a birding trip in Costa Rica:
Today we’ll be birding at Carara National Park on the Pacific Coast where I expect to see monkeys and the park’s most famous bird, the scarlet macaw.
Encountering monkeys in the wild is a new experience for me. Because we humans are the only primates who live outside subtropical zones most of us only see primates in captivity.
At Carara we’re likely to see white-headed capuchins (Cebus capucinus), shown above. These diurnal monkeys are highly intelligent and very social, living in troops of about 16 individuals that are mostly female kin because the males move around. White-headed capuchins love to use tools and are so smart that they can be trained in captivity to assist paraplegics.
If we hear an otherworldly roar like a dinosaur, it’ll be a mantled howler monkey (Alouatta palliata). The howlers roar both day and night but can be hard to find.
Click here to hear the howl while a woman searches for the source. Perhaps they “sound like dinosaurs” because the foley editors used howler voices in Jurassic Park.
Today’s highlight, though, will be the beautiful wild scarlet macaws (Ara macao).
These huge members of the parrot family have a wide range — from Central to South America — but they need a lot of territory that’s remote from humans in order to survive. Carara provides that space.
I hope to see scarlet macaws flying, as in the photo below. I’ve seen green-winged macaws (Ara chloropterus) in free flight at the National Aviary but seeing scarlets — and in the wild — will be a real treat.
And for those of you who love reptiles, there’s a bonus. Carara National Park has American crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus). No, they are not alligators. Click here to see.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)
Day 3: Carara National Park