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.