A Song for August 16
If the playback aborts before the end, trying playing the sound from inside the checklist.
It's pretty amazing to find a kingbird performing its dawnsong at 7:15, in the second half of August. I'll take it.
I was here at the PODS site to transact business, but as I say, I always have the recording gear with me. These birds were hanging out
in the tops of the tall trees that remain after this industrial site was cut out of the forest. The remaining trees
buffered the noise of a busy interstate nearby. I don't think these kingbirds are worried about any of that. If you look at the
background of the sonogram you will see that the kingbird sounds are tucked in a quiet zone between the
highway noise below and insect sounds above.
The first part of this performance is actually multiple sets of twitter-zeer.
Dawnsong kicks in at 0:41. Pieplow translates the dawnsong elements as DZEE-tyurrit.
Dzeer tails off more at the end than Dzee.
SOURCES
In writing the commentary for these posts I have made extensive use of the invaluable
bioacoustic resources listed below. For phylogenetic information, I often start with a web
search of "Phylogeny of x," where x is an avian genus, family, or order. That is a hit-or-miss
proposition. A recently-released
resource that makes phylogenetic queries more systematic is the
Birds of the World
website from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If you follow the link and type the name of an
avian family into the search box, you will be able to visit a home page for that family that presents
the number of genera and species, and an illustration for each genus.
If you subscribe, you will get more information.
Also available to subscribers is the Birds of the World species accounts.
Rolled out in 2020, this is currently an amalgam of the Birds of North America series, that was initiated by
the American Ornithologists' Union around 1990, a recently-initiated online equivalent for Neotropical Birds,
and the Handbook of Birds of the World series that was produced
by Lynx Edicions, also beginning in the 90s. BNA has been hosted by the Lab of O for some time, and they recently
added HBW to their portfolio. Especially useful for my purposes is the Systematics History subsection of the BNA accounts.
EBird still has its separate species pages for all the birds of the world. These feature photos, recordings, range maps, and
numerical eBird statistics, but little text. Overall, the abundance and availability of resources is astounding. Never has so
much been available to so many for so little.
INVALUABLE RESOURCES
Nathan D. Pieplow. 2017.
Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Nathan D. Pieplow. 2019.
Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Donald Kroodsma. 2005.
The Singing Life of Birds. Houghton Mifflin.
