Killdeer or Kill Dear?

Kill Dear? Not on my watch.

The killdeer is named for the way its call sounds like the bird is crying, “killdeer, killdeer.”

But, maybe the namers of birds got it wrong, and the name should be “kill, dear?”

As an exposed ground-nester, the killdeer will pretend to have a broken wing to lure approaching predators away from nests and young. Their plaintive calls accompany this distraction display. Given this context, the call sounds more like, “Kill, dear? Kill, dear?”

Please pay heed to local dog-leash rules designed to protect breeding birds. Suitable nesting habitat is already in short supply due to human development (and its many offending offshoots such as climate change and invasive species encroachment). There are plenty of places set aside for dogs to run and chase and get their wiggles out. I’m a huge fan of dogs running and chasing and getting their wiggles out, and I’m also a huge fan of giving birds some small speck of habitat where they have a chance to raise their young undisturbed by human (and human’s bff’s) disruptions.

Even if your dog only wants to play and wouldn’t intentionally hurt a flea, its unbounded presence around ground-nesting birds can have devastating consequences.

Getting chased around by a dog wastes a lot of valuable energy. Are you a parent? After a long day of caring for your child, would you have the energy to deal with an exuberant dog chasing you or your child in circles around a field? Would running around pretending to have a broken arm feel like a good use of your time and energy? What if you knew if a dog found your baby your baby would get chomped?

I don’t have kids of my own, but I hear parenting is an active verb. Parents have limited energy reserves that require more worthy applications than dog avoidance. Every calorie a bird expends on your dog is a calorie that could have gone towards producing more healthy babies that grow into healthy adults that have more healthy babies. Beyond the energy expenditure a bird undergoes every time it’s flushed from the nest, the commotion caused by a dog near a nest alerts more adept predators to the nest location.

Thanks for hearing my PSA for protecting nesting birds from our favorite, most enthusiastic fur friends. And next time you hear the call of a killdeer, know that you’ve stumbled upon a very cool bird. Killdeer that nest in Wisconsin overwinter as far south as Central, America. They return north when there’s enough exposed, thawed ground to provide access to a steady food supply (of mostly invertabrates). Fun fact, killdeer do most of their foraging at night when their meals of worms and other subterranean critters move closer to the soil’s surface. Yum, yum, yum. You can find killdeer by day or night frequenting agricultural fields, prairies, shorelines, and large open lawns like those found on golf courses or at sports complexes.

Tufted Titmouse

Hooray! The tufted titmouse is here to give us a chance to practice the identification skills we picked up earlier in the guide. Like with many birds, the easiest way to identify titmouse vocalizations is by comparing them to other birds. The titmouse conveniently sounds like a cross between a black-capped chickadee and a blue jay on drugs (no surprise there, blue jay).

The Titmouse and the Babysitter’s BF

The tufted titmouse, although unfortunately named, thinks he’s a cool guy. Still, nobody could be as cool as his babysitter’s boyfriend. Little Tufted Tit reminds the couple they are there most exclusively to watch his cousin, Chickadee, who is already tucked into bed like a little baby. Tufted titmouse insists he gets to stay up late. To sound impressive, he imitates the cool babysitter’s boyfriend, Blue Jay. Remember, Jay often shrieks,

“Jay! Jay! Jay!”

Tufted Titmouse gives this a try. He calls out his own name— sort of. Tufted Titmouse rightly hates his given name, and insists others call him Peter.

“Peter! Peter! Peter!”

He calls in a voice that sounds similar to the jay’s clownish cop whistle impression. Titmouse is trying for anything but clownish. He takes himself most seriously.

Jay shows no interest, only mild irritation. Titmouse wants to stay up late with the big kids. He tries another tac. He knows about jay’s little hobby. He announces this knowledge to the world, hoping jay will be impressed,

“Weeder! Weeder! Weeder!”

That’s the 6th grader word for what the upper levels are doing when they skip class at Tufted Titmouse Academy. Neither the babysitter nor her boyfriend are impressed. Titmouse tries again— acts like the others are missing the joke,

“Neener! Neener! Neener!”

He won’t quit. He sings out his poor imitation of the blue jay’s whistle even after the babysitter threatens she’ll tell Grandma EVERYTHING.

A Brief Anecdote on Chickadee’s Rivalry with Cousin Titmouse (and Grandma’s Bias)

By day, Tufted Titmouse really does feel like a cool guy. He can tell his cousin, the black-capped chickadee, envies him for his size, his crest, his golden fringed vest, his big city accent. Chickadee does envy him, but takes solace in the knowledge that no one will ever grace Grandma’s walls like he does. Titmouse may be cool, but chickadee is beloved.

Despite the Name, Let’s Get Serious

The tufted titmouse is in fact cousin to the chickadee. Chickadees and titmice reside in the family Paridae. The titmouse is larger and more aggressive than the chickadee, but the cousins can be found foraging in the same flocks. They share many physical and behavioral traits, but the titmouse is larger and often more aggressive.

If you hear something that sounds like it could be a chickadee’s cousin with a big city accent, check it out. Titmice often repeat the “dee-dee-dee” part that’s familiar from the chickadee call. When they say it, it’s buzzier, messier, and often louder.

During breeding season, if you hear that call interspersed with a song that sounds like a chemically impared jay doing its traffic cop clownish whistle, you may be on the trail of a titmouse.

The titmouse insistently repeats its two syllable song. Like chickadees, titmice remain relatively (relatively!— everyone has boundaries that should be honored!) unperturbed by the presence of people, meaning if you are respectful about it, you can poke around and track them down without scaring them away. Like chickadees, they’re cavity nesters that travel in mixed winter flocks. If you’re catching sight of a titmouse in winter, keep your eyes and ears peeled for chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers. If you are hearing a lot from them in spring, keep on the lookout for promising nesting cavities. What could be more adorable than a baby titmouse?

Around southern Wisconsin anyhow, titmice are less common than chickadees. With their fancy crest and sleek plummage (that is just the absolute most fun and perfect color to paint with watercolor), they are a true gem of a bird. Catching a glimpse of one of these guys is always a treat.

Titmouse song sounds a lot like the jay’s whistle but always made of two notes repeated.

Titmouse call demonstrates their relation to chickadees with the repeated “Dee-dee-dee.”

Blue Jay

Blue jays squall their way through busy days, calling out their own name with shouts of, “Jay, Jay, Jay, Jay!”

They are kind of full of themselves like that.

Blue jays make many other nuanced vocalizations that can be tricky to place if their calls are new to you. Good thing when blue jays are around, you’ll usually know it (unless they are in the process of being sneaky, quietly trying to steal eggs to eat from other bird’s nests or hiding their own nests from other predators).

Compared to most passerines (birds that perch), blue jays are on the larger end. With a prominent crest, bright blue feathers, and bold black and white markings, blue jays are easy to visually identify.

I’m sharing blue jays early in the guide because they make a good comparison bird when you’re learning upcoming species.

Blue jays are brighter, bluer, louder, and bigger than most songbirds.

Blue jays travel in noisy flocks, acting as if they are well-aware of their status as “the most” of everything. They’re like the cool guy trouble-makers, the stars of the high school hockey team or something—some slightly more alternative sport than football. They get great grades in school, but they do things that get them sent to detention on the regular. In fact, if blue jays were on the hockey team, they’d be much like my high school hockey team of yore after half the team got suspended for getting caught smoking pot. The jays would definitely get caught because when they’re not talking about themselves, they’re still yelling “jay,” only it’s for other reasons. They are a boisterous bunch.

With a big case of the munchies, groups are known to descend upon birdfeeders to throw seed-scattering parties. Sometimes at these parties, the comic of the crew will show off extra by throwing around a few vocal impressions. The blue jay’s impressions repertoire is somewhat limited with the best impression being that of the red-shouldered hawk. Sometimes, she’ll also let loose a whistle, as if impersonating another wearer of blue—an  officer of the law. The whistle is only an impression—meant to sound like a clownlike, mocking version of the real thing.

Top Left: Classic jay call.

Top Right: Jay’s best red-shouldered hawk impression.

Bottom Left: Jay’s clownish traffic cop whistle.

Anyhow, whenever a group of jays squalls its way through my neck of the woods, I feel lucky to share a bit of the day with them. They keep track of all the goings on around their neighborhood, so hanging with them for awhile means you become privy to their insider knowledge of their home turf. Blue jays are known to mob (pester, make a fuss about, chase, generally reveal then annoy) avian predators. If you hear an unusually large commotion from jays, investigate and you might be rewarded with an owl sighting. Following jays can also lead you to food sources used by other wildlife, smaller songbird’s nests (and maybe some morbidity—a jay’s gotta eat), or just a visual spectacle—especially in fall when their blue feathers match the sky and contrast with the golds of a turning sugar maple.

Birdsong, Why?

There’s so much I want to say, I’ve delayed saying anything at all. Here’s a quick introduction (three hours later turns out it’s rather lengthy) on how I came to this project and why I think we’d all benefit from listening more to birdsong. From here, I plan to continue to roll out regular installments of new species identification and birding practice pointers. There are a host of common backyard birds that make great starter subjects for beginning birders. Once we’ve established a solid foundation with those species, I’ll ease into birds that are either less common or more difficult to identify. Birding is a practice. The more you know, the easier it is to synthesize new information. Identifications will get easier as you build a solid relationship to the most common birds.

Also, of note, I’m trying to stay on track to keep posts aligned to what is showing up in our neighborhoods as spring progresses. April brings an influx of returning spring migrants to southern Wisconsin, where I’m located, so we’ll see…

Background on the Guide’s Impetus

As an idea, this guide has been around for several years. In the spring of 2018, I was headed into my third field season growing produce and tending a small goat herd at Thistle Whistle Farm in Hotchkiss, Colorado. My course changed when I got selected as a juror for a high-profile murder trial. I had been thinking I needed a change for a while, and it turns out jury duty for a murder trial was just the kickstart I needed. Ugh.

First snow, last season at Thistle Whistle. Aspens aglow and sunchokes abloom.

I was living in the tiny, artsy town of Paonia on the Western Slope. Farming was rewarding but not to my bank account and not necessarily to my social life. And I had reached the conclusion that Thoreau might have been right with his line that the land owns the farmer. I was restless. Then after a long selection process, jury duty began in earnest and lasted all through April. As the landscape was coming to life, I was in a courtroom in one of the most conservative counties in Colorado contemplating big mistakes and big consequences; big flaws in our social constructs; generally speaking, big, heavy, heavy stuff. The world felt like a hurty place then. I had sworn under oath I’d not talk about the trial during my time as a juror, and I stuck to that. So, my head spun day and night, and I took a lot of walks. I watched a lot of birds.

I hired onto a job with the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies that spring. It was an ideal field job for me. I got to get out of Paonia— a place for me that had become a physical representation of all that big, heavy, heavy stuff.  With my new job, I got to travel to a new location every workday. I was getting paid to explore Colorado’s wildest places.

I’ve done this type of work before. I worked two seasons in New Mexico on a breeding survey of Mexican Spotted Owls. I worked a field season monitoring greater sage grouse and sage-obligate songbirds in northern Colorado, and southern Wyoming. I worked a season as a songbird survey crew leader in the sage-steppe of central Montana, and I monitored the fall raptor migration just outside of Missoula, Montana, a few years before that. I’ve held many other jobs working in field biology with flightless animals (and plants), and I’ve dipped in and out of farming and ranching where my interest in nature and for environmental stewardship happily meld with my love of food.

I recently discovered something. Hairy woodpeckers have five-inch-long tongues that circle their skulls and one eye. The tongues are bristly and sticky and have musculature that allows them to wiggle enough to catch insects in small crevices. What!?

Where the magic happens these days.

Birds to me speak of the wonders of evolution. Every single living thing is a part of this complex dance that is evolution. Therefore, every living thing speaks to a connection to a place and its history. It’s mind-blowing stuff. When you invest in the practice of birding, you gain the rewards of discovering these deeper connections, of learning the steps to the dance of life.

My wonder, awe and past field experiences did not prepare me to be a truly effective bird surveyor in 2018. Colorado hosts something upward of 200 bird species. My job had me exploring a multitude of landscapes, representing a variety of ecosystems that host a large portion of these many species. I arrived at that jobs’ week-long orientation and training as the least practiced birder in a group of about twelve people. By birder, here I mean bird identifier. It turns out, for how much I love birds, I don’t really fit in the box of what I think of as the classic birder. A friend recently aptly described me as less of a birder and more of a poker-around. I am more interested in behavior and the story an identification can reveal to me. I’m less interested in checking birds off a list, chasing down rare birds, or getting too deep in the weeds with taxonomic classification. I can lose whole days to sitting and watching, but I often forget to bring my field guide along, and I rarely look things up on my phone while I’m in the field. The last thing I want to be doing is poking around my phone when I could be poking around this whole big world.

These traits seem counter to what I’ve experienced of other birders who seem to thrill in the puzzle of making identifications. I think about this a lot because I go birding with people a lot, and I end up wondering each time anew why it feels like I don’t fit in.

Today, my outsider’s insider status is what I think makes this guide work. But not fitting the bird nerd mold made me shy with the other birders at that Bird Conservancy orientation. Where under other circumstances I’d take the role of class clown, instead I found myself being called on by the training supervisor like I was the kid he wasn’t sure was getting it hiding out in the back of the class.

I was the kid hiding out in the back of class not so much because I my skillset ranked as that remidial compared to my peers, but because I felt like if I didn’t bird with the same style of enthusiasm as all the experts around me, my accumulated knowledge must somehow be inferior. Usually, I’m confident and assertive. In the group of big-league birders, even when I knew a bird inside and out, I never said a peep. Get it, a peep!?

This crew knew their stuff. They’d hear one half-peep from a bird and announce its species, subspecies, and morph (a term for coloration).

I’m bad with names. As a birder, that’s difficult. In my own defense, I think a lot of bird names are lame. Who comes up with them? Long past white guys who by default of their positioning held narrow views of how things should be…

Bird names for me often lack much for context cues. Maybe they speak to an identifying characteristic, but that’s kind of dull. I need real context— not just a color and a body part or some long-gone guy’s name.

Context is key. It’s key to learning and remembering, and it’s key to caring. Context offers a feedback loop. Here’s the equation: context plus caring equals connection. If I see a bird, I want to know if that bird has a five-inch-long tongue wrapped around its skull and one eye. Why not both eyes by the way? I want to know what is going on with that bird and why. To get there though, you must start with the basics.

At bird camp as I’ll call it, we studied birds nonstop. We were either out watching and listening, or we were sitting around picnic tables with our guides and apps and scopes and binos at the ready. It was the ultimate bird-nerd extravaganza.

Sorry, no photos from bird camp. Just me recently out nerding.

At bird camp, I found myself really struggling to differentiate between swallows. I remember back in my Montana bird identification crew days a pair of swallows passed overhead, and my two crew members got out their guides and debated for ten minutes which kind of swallows we just saw. I remember being bored and annoyed. Who cares? They are all the kind of bird that flies past all fast and neck crampingly high. They all fly around together in a mixed jumble of species, so who knows who is making what sound, and if they are all doing the same thing anyhow, what does it matter if one is called one thing and the other another?

But at bird camp I was getting paid to know exactly which species was which. It made a difference for the scientists who were going to apply my collected data to help inform consequential land-management decisions. Each bird has different habitat needs. They look the same passing in a flash, but if you get to know them, each species plays a unique role in the ecosystem. Each bird has its own story, and those stories all tie together. Those stories tell the story of a place.

It’s just so hard to care when you just see a flash of a thing, and you don’t have the context to get to a place where the other parts of the story make themselves known to add color and light and dimension to the scene. See how birding applies to other facets of life? How the practice of bird identification equates to a sort of meditation? A sort of life practice? A sort of being that gives us the ultimate gift of empathy? This is a bird identification blog, but don’t be fooled. By practicing birding skills, you are dipping your toes deep into life’s self-help section.

Seeing a flash of a bird and practicing rote memorization of some identifying feature sounds like the opposite of fun to me. When I’m in those situations, I want to run screaming.  I found myself in those situations a bit at bird camp, but I also found that my fellow birders with all their collective years of knowledge and experience shared a wealth of stories as they bubbled with enthusiasm over their identifications. The details and emotions in those stories offered me the context that allowed me to flip a switch in my brain so I could see the benefit of making the full effort to differentiate between species.

Then, someone said the rough-winged swallow sounded like it was farting on all the other swallows. I was all in. Here was a foothold in context. I could stand on that until I built a solid foundation made from personal experience.

This guide is the foothold you can stand on until you have built a foundation of personal experience.

Once, at bird camp, we made a game of describing what the various swallows sounded like, and then I disappeared off to my tent and drew everything out as cartoons so I would remember. I was so tickled by my drawings that I later emerged from my tent able to identify all the swallows in Colorado. And I found myself willing and eager to show my coworkers my drawings. I made a peep and more. And my coworkers said, “You should make a guide. I’d totally read it.”

Some Thoughts on the Bird Guide

This past year, our lives became unmoored. Our usual markers, those markers we always assumed to be indispensable, those markers that keep us on our daily paths proved ultimately—disposable. Disoriented as we were, we went on without our annual celebrations, our daily commutes, our routines, our certainties, our frameworks within which we had built our lives.

The thing with birds is they exist in large part outside of human constructs. They go on with their seasons, their migrations, their next generations, their songs, whether people are watching or not. Birds offer a framework that isn’t going away. My life this past year looked totally different from the one I expected. Still, knowing the nature of things, I am comforted in knowing the days still have structure. Birds remind me I am part of a bigger whole.

A Last Anecdote

Friends and family often send me texts describing a bird they want me to help identify. They know I delight in their enthusiasm, but behind that delight, I often wish they’d provide a few more authenticating details. From these texts, I gather that new or novice birders depend primarily on color and size to identify birds.

A recent text, “Bird? Black and white, long legs, on the ground by gravel and dirt. Lots of singing.”

I responded, “Mockingbird.”

Yay me for that quick ID. If I didn’t fear it would dampen the flame of birding enthusiasm, my ideal response to that text would go, “Thank you after all these years of texting me descriptions solely based on color for finally including a line about habitat and behavior. In our human experience we are given the gift of being a piece of the universe—a piece that is capable of being conscious of itself. Isn’t that marvelous? We hold the great gift of awareness, and yet, we are minute specks in the grand scheme of creation. In our blood swims the history of our ancestors. If we track the trail of our DNA back far enough, we reach the inevitable conclusion that we all sprouted from the same humble beginnings as single-celled swamp muck on a planet that would be utterly unrecognizable to us today. If we go back further, we will come to see that we are literally made of space debris. We barely have the capacity to comprehend the workings of our daily lives, let alone our neighbor’s lives, let alone the infinite gestures of time and space. So, thank you for including that note on the bird’s habitat and behavior. How often we get lost in our myopic vision of things. If we open ourselves up to ask not only what but why—we open ourselves to see the connections between things. We open our narrow pinprick view of the great mystery that is existence, and how rewarding this new vantage!”

My thumbs have never gotten the hang of texting. If I tried to send that text, I’d be lost on a futon somewhere, dehydrated, emaciated, with a very low battery on a phone that just got flung across the room.

A Case for Birding by Sound Because Every Good Blog Contains Lots of Lists

1.       Birds are often hard to see but easy to hear. Let’s pick the low fruit!

2.       Even when you get a good view of a bird, you are left to pick through often subtle visual cues to differentiate species. Audio cues are usually more straight-forward and thus easier to differentiate. More low-hanging fruit!

3.       Listening is a practice. The practice will bleed into other facets of your life, leaving you more grounded and better situated to deal with yourself and others.

4.       The sounds birds make add a rich layer of story that can inform on their behavior, the habitat you find them in, what is happening in your neck of the woods and when. The more you know about birdsong and calls, the more you will know about wherever you are. You will start to build connections that lead to greater curiosity for the natural world.

4.5. When you get to know your local birds, you are getting to know the seasons, the weather, the minutia, and the grand scheme. Becoming familiar with birds leads to a richness in experience that extends well beyond birds.

5.       When you correctly identify a bird, you will greatly impress friends, family, and lovers.

6.       Well-practiced birding is a form of meditation. What activities bring on human’s most desired states? Sex, drugs, rock & roll, and bird nerding. We seek out these conditions that at their base are the same. They cause us to lose ourselves. In the process we connect to something greater. When we hit just the right note, we shed our baggage and move through the world on a plane that feels like, well, something a step closer to divinity. We connect with the present in a way that opens us up to that great big idea that we are part of something so much more than our biggest woes, or greatest triumphs, our deepest shames, our darkest hours, our mightiest joys.

7, 8, 9, 10.       Hairy woodpeckers have five-inch-long tongues that wrap around their skulls and their right eye.

American Robin

Robins are the literal early bird that gets the worm. As the dawn chorus’s opening act, robins start to sing well before sunrise.

Like a good yard sale, the robin speaks to the suburban experience. On a summer day look out at any lawn, and you’re likely to see a robin. Watch telephone wires, treetops, clotheslines, anyplace with a foothold and a prominent view, and you’ll eventually catch sight of a robin. Because they are ubiquitous, robins are a good “early bird” for practicing identification as a beginning birder.

Robin songs are easily identified through temporal cues. They are among the first birds to sing each morning. Robin song dominates the earliest half-hour or so of the dawn chorus. When I worked as a songbird survey technician, it was my job to wake up before sunrise to get out when birds are most vocally active in the wee morning hours. I associate robin song with those moments in bed just after my alarm has sounded but before I’ve gotten the gumption to rise and make my way out to the field. It’s still pitch-black outside, but the robins are already at it, singing their lilting melodies. For me, their song conjures that feeling of resistance the body makes when its begging to press snooze but forced into action. The robins were their own sort of alarm clock, telling me I’d reached beyond the realm of snooze.

Above: The robin’s song consists of a flowing melody that sounds as if it’s pulling loopy-di-loops on itself. Many species sound similar to robins, but theirs is the only call to fray into nearly inaudible high notes.

Above: Cheaps appear as isolated spikes

Robins must love good deals, the way they’re always yelling, “Cheap, cheap, cheap.” Maybe they are excited about yardsale deals, but more likely they are feeling territorial. Robins often nest near human activity, and in doing so, they put themselves and their nests in our paths. When we cross those paths, robins often scold us with relentless, close-range cheaps. Since it’s so common, novice birders will do well to pay attention and learn to describe the call. Some useful descriptors might include: loud, sharp, and insistent. Think about how the call rates next to other things you hear around the yard, on your walk to work, in the parking lot, wherever. If you learn the topography of the robin’s call, you can later employ it as a baseline of comparison for other species.

I also associate robins with rain, with that feeling of stepping with bare feet onto a steaming sidewalk after a passing summer shower. Robins break into song after rain as if they are celebrating the return of the sun. It’s a jovial song with lots of ups and downs, most often sung in a chorus (individual robins chiming in across the land), so that the song of the robin adds its own color to the ornate tapestry of this Midwestern landscape.

Recently fledged robins appear a bit clownish with their speckled bellies and overlarge beaks. Through peak yard sale season, watch them hop their ways towards the day when they grow their big-kid feathers and fly away..

Robins also make a high pitched, sometimes barely audible alarm call that goes something like, “sssssp.” Alarm calls across species are often high-pitched, consisting of frequencies that are hard for predators (like people) to track. If you think you hear a robin’s alarm call, take a second to stand still and scan the ground and low branches for birds. It’s good practice for your ears to follow sounds to their source, and it’s good practice to take a cue to pause and re-attune yourself to your surroundings. If the day is going along as usual and everyone seems to be calmly going about their business before you hear a sudden flurry of “ssssssps,” take the chance to look for the source of the robin’s alarm. Tuning into alarm calls is a great way to catch rare glimpses of more elusive wildlife.

That’s what’s great about robins. They are so common, they offer us a thread that’s always within reach and sturdy enough to keep us connected to the natural world. Wherever we are, however busy or distracted, there’s a robin doing its robin thing, singing its robin song, reminding us that there’s a whole world out there ready and waiting for us to take notice.

Chickadee

Listen to their song at Cornell Bird Lab and you can decide, chickadee or cheeseburger… or none of the above.

On Calls Versus Songs

Hey girl? Cheeseburger? Don’t chickadees just say, “chickadee?”

Chickadee Song: Two long, drawn out whistles with a bump of a third sylable inbetween.

Chickadee Call: Familiar call from multiple individuals.

Chickadees do say chickadee, but their repertoire doesn’t stop there. Like most birds, chickadees use a variety of vocalizations. In the birding world, vocalizations are distinguished as either calls or songs. When the chickadee says, “Chickadee-dee-dee,” she’s calling. Birds call to communicate all sorts of things—things that range from their location, to what they are eating, to their alarm over a passing predator.

Someday I hope to write all about calls because like most everything about birds, calls are cool. The chickadee for example changes its signature, “Chick-a-dee” call to suit the situation. If a chickadee perceives a threat, it will call out to alert members of its mixed-species flock. As the level of perceived threat increases, so do the number of “dees” tagged onto the end of a chickadee’s call. Where a passing shadow might elicit a “dee-dee” a lurking cat could get a “dee-dee-dee-dee.” And know what else is cool—all the birds in that mixed-species flock can translate calls from the other species in the flock. That means, in this example, everybody in the flock knows if the chickadee is talking about a threat from above or below.

I could continue on with call coolness, but this is the Birdsong Blog, not the Bird Call Blog.

Birds most often sing as part of territorial displays and/or to attract a mate. For the most part, singing is a seasonal affair that coincides with breeding. Like everybody, birds get competitive about access to potential mates, food, and suitable nest sites. Singing plays the dual role of telling suitors, “Here I am, look how fit I am,” and telling competition, “I am here. I am fit, and if you want what I got, well then, prepare for a duel (quite likely in song).”

It’s all much less romantic than Snow White would have you believe.

Anyhow, chickadees call year-round, but around here they start to sing when winter hits its death throes. Their singing tapers again as nesting gets into full swing come mid-summer.

On Cheeseburger Verus Hey Girl

The chickadee’s song sounds something like they are saying in a high descending whistle, “cheeseburger” and/or “hey girl”.

Take a listen for yourself. It’s a simple song, pitched towards melancholy for us depressive types (who isn’t suffering from SAD by the time the first chickadees sing each year?). To me, the chickadee’s song is an example of the type that once you get one positive ID to confirm that, yup, for sure that was a chickadee singing, you’ll never forget it. It’s common. It’s distinct. Hearing those plaintive notes after so much winter silence hits with emotional force.

So why then do we have to go and ruin it by telling ourselves, “Listen, he’s saying cheeseburger!”?

If you’re coming into this not in the know, bird nerds (and people trying to ruin my day) far and wide say the chickadee’s song sounds like he’s saying, “cheeseburger.” This really sticks in my craw. I don’t hear it. I don’t want to hear it. Literally, I rarely hear the middle syllable of the chickadee’s supposed cheeseburger. I’m like, “What? Cheese burg? What’s a cheese burg? Is it like, an iceberg of cheese? Did this chickadee have a harrowing encounter with this thing called a cheese burg?”

The absurdity—to turn a song that causes this listener to feel briefly that the whole of the monarch migration has pit-stopped in her belly into a message that conveys cheeseburger.

On Anthropomorphism as Pertains to Cheeseburgers and Memes

Anthropomorphism. At risk of becoming tedious (as all discussions on words containing 15 or more letters inevitably become), I’m on the side of anthropomorphizing. Doing so gives us stories and stories give us context and context helps us understand the true nature of the happenings all around us. Understanding nature’s nature comes from building connection. If we need that anthropomorphic boost to find a way to scrounge up a thread of connection, then great, let’s go for it.

But cheeseburger? Why would a chickadee even be talking about a cheeseburger? As this guide evolves, I will anthropomorphize a lot. I hope to do so in a way that plays off characteristics that speak to a species’ ecology, life history, observed behavior, etc.

I don’t want to associate this or any song that melts my heart anew each spring with some dumb nothing that someone thought was cute.

“Hey girl” is my answer to cheeseburger. I fear it’s another dumb nothing, but at least it’s my dumb nothing. As a practice, dumb nothings of your own are quite handy so long as you realize its futile to cling to something that’s essentially nothing.

With hey girl, I’m thinking of the Ryan Gosling memes, of this super hunk doing whatever just right to win your heart. The chickadee is the super hunk of birds. Chickadees top out at a few measly ounces, and yet they persevere through the harshest of winter landscapes without letting those few ounces freeze to feather fluff icicles… or worse… chickadee cheese burgs.

Spring comes, and the chickadees are alive, and they’re like, “We’re alive. We’d better get to making babies!”

And off they go to sing their baby-making song that sounds to me like this real earnest, quiet kind of guy who is just so in touch with his feelings, so confident his territory has some good nest-making tree cavities, that he’s like, “Hey girl. Heeey, gurl. Hey. Girl.”

If you made it this far, you can handle a little unsolicited advice. Well, maybe it’s solicited. This is like an advice column for nascent birders. The advice: Get up early—like sunrise early. Go outside. Listen. You’ll hear it, and you’ll go, “Ooooh, I hear it.” From that day forth with a bit of luck and a smidge of resolve, the next time you hear a chickadee sing, your mind will have nothing to do with cheeseburgers or memes because you’ll be busy thinking of that sunrise when you first knew you were listening to the song of the super hunk chickadee.

Northern Cardinal

Cardinals are one of the first singers of the year. They belt out their crooner crossed with car alarm tunes starting around Valentine’s Day. How romantic. As one of the first species to break into song each spring they offer us an exciting marker for the end of winter, and they give beginning birders a great opportunity to learn the cardinal’s song when they are still working solo acts. In mid-Febuary, not a lot of other songs are out there to compete for our attention or confuse things.

Male cardinals do the majority of the singing, and those males are bright red. In the Midwest if there’s snow on the ground, cardinals are the only bright red bird you’re going to see. (In the summer, various tanagers can compete for the brightest of red birds, but they would be a rare and exciting spots, whereas cardinals, although always exciting, are rarely— well— rare.) As a common bird with a loud voice who solos for several weeks before other birds start competing for airplay, cardinals are a great place to start if you’re hoping to build a foundation around which to build your bird identification practice.

The cardinal song is a mix of extended yet seperated downward notes followed by a super slow trill that sounds like a car alarm. Jump to about 0:19 to get the full cardinal effect.

What do you think? Does the cardinal sound a little like comeback-era Elvis? The males boast the style of Elvis circa an off-night version of Viva Las Vegas. They sport the high pompador (called a crest in elite birding communities), their guady red attire outshines even a bejeweled jumpsuit.

Do you hear the crooner crossed with car alarm? Compared to other regional species, the cardinal’s song can be called melodic. It occupies a songbird middleground as neither complex nor simple. Like a car alarm, it’s loud and repetetive.

In another shout out to Cornell Labs, check out the Macaulay Library. In this treasure-trove of recordings, you can explore what feels like a limitless collection of audio files for species around the world. The recordings play along with a real-time visual readout of the audio. The visual lends a physical shape to the song’s construction giving cues for pitch, tempo, pauses, and patterns.

I find this to be the coolest resource. I love having access to this extra level of context. We’ve come a long way from when I was learning to identify birdsongs in large part by reading the song descriptions in my field guide. My Sibley Guide (duct-taped along the spine from overuse) writes out the cardinal song as soundling like “slurred whistles woit, woit, woit, chew chew chew chew chew.” The above text in the car alarm image is equally vague. It’s hard to describe sounds using words. Speaking of which, as a way to afford your practice even more context, it can be helpful to try to explain the song to someone else or use your field journal as a place to describe what you hear. Use whatever works to trigger your memory and help you assoiate this crimson crooning car alarm with the Northern Cardinal.

But wait… the ladies!

Female birds often get overlooked when birders are first beginning to practice identification. Birds are commonly sexually dimorphic, meaning males and females of a species differ in physical characteristics. Females are often drabber in coloration and not as vocally active as males. That means females demonstrate fewer quick and ready markers for identification.

Females in general are rad there’s no doubt. If I overlook females here, it’s because you must first learn the obvious before you have the capacity to recognize the subtle. In birds and many species, males trend towards the obvious.

Anyhow, female cardinals are subtly beautiful with sandy coloration augmented with orange highlights and a saturated orange bill. All cardinals like to visit backyard feeders, so feeding stations are a place where you’re likely to see cardinals in all their forms. Back to the lounge act— cardinals tend to linger at feeders late into the evening. Think of them like groupies lingering at the lounge long after the less audacious birds have flittered off to bed.