Birdcalls

7-4-10 When you start watching birds as a hobby, when you just pick up the sport, it is very necessary to actually see the bird to identify it. To have good binoculars and a large bird who will sit still long enough to focus the binoculars. And then match what you see to the bird in the book. And you're birding...

A lot of my enjoyment of birding has to do slowing down and appreciating a bird's feeding behavior, observing its mating ritual or noting its child rearing techniques. I admire a bird's struggle to survive in a cruel world, and I like seeing existence from the bird's point of view.

When you get to what might be called intermediate birding, you get used to seeing and identifying birds and begin to recognize some of them by their song, their alarm call, how they say "Here I am !" to other birds.

The Eastern Wood Pewee (Contopus virens) says "pee-ah-wee" to identify itself. The Carolina Wren (Thryomanes ludovicianus) says "teacher, teacher, teacher". Not all ducks quack. Life is more complicated than that.

Here is the website of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at Ohio State University in the US. This is a great resource of animal sounds on the internet.

To listen to a birdcall, go to the page, select a species, then choose "search". It will land on a page of recordings. You must then choose one, and click on it. The next page contains a playable or saveable mp3 file of the bird sound.

Try the recording of the King Eider ( Somateria spectabilis ). It breeds only in the Arctic, including Iceland, and lives in the ocean along the coast. The good people at Borror have recorded a King Eider hatchling squeaking and squawking in the nest. The hatchling is the second of the two King Eider recordings.

-Robert