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Re: remembering song you hear in the field

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Maurice Barnhill

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Maryland Birds & Birding

Date:

Sun, 2 May 2004 15:49:11 -0400

As people have said, you have to go over the songs from tapes or CDs so that you have something to work with.  However, I am convinced that different people use different characteristics of the song to recognize them.  So some people are using mostly tonal quality, some mostly rhythm, some mostly pitch and "melody", and everyone is using their own combination of these three and maybe some I haven't thought of.

Hence you need to make your own list of similar songs, like the lists of similar-species plumages we carry around in our heads.  Unlike the similar-species lists, our similar-song lists may not be particularly the same from one person to another.  You can start from someone else's list, but you may have to modify it.  This is a lot of work, even if you make the lists mentally only, but it is a great help when you hear a song you don't recognize to be able to say "It has to be X, Y, or Z.  Now X is like Y but ...."  This is what you do with a strange-looking bird, and it is what you need to do with a strange-sounding bird.

To illustrate what I mean, take the overly simple case of Vireos.  There is a set that sing short phrases one after another:  Red-eyed, Yellow-throated, Solitary, Philadelphia.  Red-eyed is sweet, Yellow-throated is burry, Solitary has wider slurs than the others and is not burry, and Philadelphia is so like Red-eyed that the Vireos themselves are fooled (or so I have been told).  Other somewhat similar songs are the two Tanagers, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, maybe Robin, maybe some others. White-eyed sings one phrase and has a long pause before the next one; there is usually an explosive consonant near the beginning or the end of the phrase.  Warbling sings a single very long phrase with all the notes connected together -- and the most dangerous other song is Blue Grosbeak.  Your groups might differ.

Remember that every single group you construct should include Mockingbird and Starling!

A second point.  If you can find a copy of the old book by A. A. Saunders, A Guide to Bird Songs, you will pick up a lot of useful concepts by reading it.  This is the only book (as opposed to recording) I ever found that helped with songs, and it deserves to be much better known.  You'll need to check a very well-stocked library I'm afraid.
--
Maurice Barnhill
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Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

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