![]() So the lengthening days and the onset of singingīehavior marks the start of the Cardinal's breeding season. also recognize most Cardinal songs.Īmong the singing birds (passerines, including the Cardinal) songsĪre believed to serve two main purposes: they have roles in establishing breeding territories and inĪttracting mates. Humans who've paid a bit of attention to birds in the eastern U.S. To the next, all Cardinals seem to recognize all the songs given by While the exact nature of the song changes from one bird Hormonal changes in the birds and a behavioral consequence of theseĬhanges is that they - especially the males - perch inĬonspicuous locations such as tree tops or the tips of branches and sing loud songs typical of Masses of arctic air, the increasing length of the days triggers The weather is especially cold and the arrival of spring delayed by In Cincinnati, where I live, Northern Cardinals (Cardinals, a.k.a NoCa) start to sing in earnestĮach year around the end of February or beginning of March. ![]() I don't need to know everything about the songs to at least share them with people. ![]() I've posted it as it is in furtherance of goal (a) above. This document is currently incomplete and, indeed, will probably never be complete. computer recognition of songs) and studies addressing particular hypotheses about Cardinal singing behavior, my main purposes are to (a) provide lots of examples of Cardinal songs and (b) idicate a varieties ways most anyone with a curiosity on bird song can have fun asking and answering questions about it. While I do go into details about sound related projects (e.g. This is short account of what I've learned about Cardinal songs. I enjoy the whole process so much - I often claim it is the only thing I'll get up before sunrise or stay out until nearly dawn to do - that I resolved to share some of the fun. Nature recordist that I met via email and 'phone - even the big name pros - have invariably been generous with their advice and helped me improve my technique. Since then I've recorded a lot of different birds with the aim of understanding their singing and of enjoying the sounds they make. That was the first recording I made that was valuable to me for sentimental reasons (who doesn't love the sound of Cranes?) and that I listened to and shared with friends because it was pretty rather than just something I could measure and draw pictures of. That fall I happened on a flock of Sandhill Cranes, threw myself down in the weeds, turned on the tape recorder, and got something like 15 minutes of audio as the flock got organized, took off (calling the while) and spiraled to altitude right over me. Those were fun time times and my simple equipment was plenty good to let me discover many things about common birds that I'd never even suspected before. I spent a zillion hours writing my own sound editing and sonogram programs. That spring and summer I carried the tape recorder whenever I went birding. And I could use a cheap recorder and free software to distinguish their songs. The sparrows in the park were singing upwards of 12 completley different songs! What I'd learned to ``identify'' as a Song Sparrow song was some collection of attributes common to most or their songs. ![]() Imagine my surprise when, having returned several times to visit and record the Song Sparrows at the park, I discovered that I'd been lazy in my listenting and hadn't paid enough attention through all the years I'd been birding. Even at that time there was free software available to edit audio files and even to visualize sounds by generating sonograms. It wasn't long before I discovered I could connect the tape recorder to a PC (headphone out to mic in) and use the computer's sound card to digitize recordings as I played them back on the tape recorder. I'd read about that too, but hadn't understood how very important singing and songs were to many birds until that day. Immediately 4 or 5 Song Sparrows turned up, started making chipping notes and looked very upset and agressive. Of course I'd read about such things and so tried playing the songs back to the bird. A Song Sparrow happened to sing from the top of a nearby shrub and I happened to turn on the recorder, capturing 2 renditions of his song. I'd stopped for a short walk at a park on my way home from work and happened to be carrying a small tape recorder that I sometimes used for dictation.
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