RSPB Guide to Birdsong

Contents

Part 1: An Introduction to Bird Songs and Calls

Introduction

How to use this guide

What is sound?

How do birds make noises?

Types of bird sound

How to describe bird sounds

Reading sonograms

What sounds to expect: Where and when?

What to expect: Habitats

Putting it all together

Turning it into learning

Part 2: Guide to Common Bird Songs and Calls

Towns and villages

Woods and copses

Upland woodland

Farmland

Reedbeds and marshes

Part 3: Reference Guide

How to Record Bird Sounds

Glossary

References

Acknowledgements

Sound Credits

Photo Credits

Track List

Bonus Track List

Audio Transcript

PART 1

An Introduction to Bird Songs and Calls

Introduction

When I was a child, my dad was the volunteer warden of a woodland nature reserve in Worcestershire. Each year in early May, he would lead guided walks in the evening. As each gathering of strangers made their way along the darkening paths, listening to the Robins and Song Thrushes sing their final refrains of the day, we all shared a palpable sense of anticipation.

When we reached our destination – a secluded glade – we would stand as though on hallowed ground, waiting, holding our breaths. At last, the main act would begin, cutting through the darkness: the song of the Nightingales (above). If luck were with us, they would perform with such power, control and creativity that people would … well, I don’t use this word often: they’d swoon.

Such experiences remind me how lucky we are. It seems little short of a miracle that one group of wildlife – the birds – have evolved to make such elaborate, musical sounds that, to our ears, are so fascinating, so entrancing and at times so exquisitely beautiful. Frogs croak, bees hum and grasshoppers chirrup but none of them pour forth their soul in such an ecstasy (as Keats extolled in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’). Birdsong is the natural soundtrack to our lives; it can evoke a sense of place, a moment, a time of day, a year or a season. However, actually getting to grips with birdsong and recognising which bird is making which sound can be seen as something of a dark art: impenetrable, unfathomable, a foreign language beyond our comprehension. Unable to make sense of it, too many people let birdsong wash over them.

But having spent more than 40 years of my life engrossed in the world of birds, I felt that there was more that could be done to help people tune in to their sounds and decode their secrets. The rewards for the effort are enormous. Those who take the time to learn will notice many more birds. By hearing more, you see more and understand more. Learning these sounds can give you insight into how each bird is feeling, and what it is trying to tell other birds around it. Bird sounds enliven your day and are a pleasant distraction from the daily grind.

More than anything, as with those evening Nightingale walks, birdsong can bring you joy, and that is what I really wanted to share. So I got out my old tent from the loft, picked up my rather large microphone, headed out into beautiful, wild places across the UK, and this book and the accompanying recordings are the results.

How to use this guide

Over the years I’ve met a few people who seem to possess a supernatural ability to hear the faintest squeak and whistle from birds that would otherwise go unseen and unnoticed, and to know what bird was making the sound in an instant.

On the other hand, I’ve met many, many more for whom bird sounds are a real challenge. Indeed, some people just don’t know where to start. This book and its accompanying recordings are for all of you! See here for information on how to access your complimentary digital download of the recordings.

The book is divided into three parts. The first two parts are akin to a learning course, to be taken at your own speed, and they run in tandem with the recordings and narration.

Part 1: An Introduction to Bird Songs and Calls is all about training your ear in how to listen, and giving you the vocabulary and techniques to describe any bird sound. At this stage, don’t worry which bird is making which sound – that will come later.

In Part 2: A Guide to Common Bird Songs and Calls, we identify 65 species of bird based on their songs and calls. This will help you to recognise the vast majority of sounds that we hear in towns and villages, woodland and the countryside.

So find 5–10 minutes every day or so, sit down somewhere quiet, either with the book or the recordings or preferably both together. Then work your way through, track by track, reading the text in these first two parts of the book, listening to the narration, replaying each recording as often as you need to and moving on when you feel ready.

Finally, Part 3 is a detailed Reference Guide, covering more than 250 widespread breeding, wintering and migrant bird species. You can dip into this section as and when you need to. As an additional tip, the sounds for these species and almost any other bird in the world can be found at your leisure on the excellent xeno-canto.org website.

Let’s start at the very beginning…

It might be tempting to skip the introductory parts of this book and get straight to the species-by-species sections. However, I encourage you to start with the opening chapters and the corresponding tracks on the recording. Get these basics in place, and everything else will be that much easier.

As the very first thing of all, listen to Tracks 1 and 2, the latter being precisely 1 minute of bird songs and calls. Play them a few times. Make a mental note of how many species you recognise; jot them down if you like. This is your starting point – you will return to this track at the end of the recordings, and hopefully, then you will discover how much you have progressed.

Track 1

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Track 2

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What is sound?

We start by going right back to basics. Don’t worry; it’s going to be brief and not too technical. Just consider for a couple of moments the question ‘What is sound?’ What is that invisible thing that comes sailing through the air, travels into your ears and which your brain translates as words, music, roars, rustles…?

A sound occurs when you twang a guitar string, start up a car engine, knock two stones together or scrunch up a sheet of paper. In every such instance, the action causes vibrations in the air. That’s all that a sound is – air particles that are knocked into each other in a chain reaction, rippling out in all directions. We call those ripples sound waves.

If we are within earshot – in other words, if the sound waves reach us before they run out of energy – they are funnelled into our inner ears by the useful flappy bits of our ears that we have on the outside of our heads.

Once inside the ear, the waves hit a stretched membrane, the eardrum, causing it to vibrate which sets off a chain reaction that wobbles the hammer bone, which knocks into the anvil bone, which shakes the stirrup bone.

1) Hammer bone

2) Anvil bone

3) Stirrup bone

4) Ear canal

5) Eardrum

6) Cochlea

Finally, the vibrations enter a spiral tube called the cochlea. On its inner walls are thousands of microscopic hair cells that move in the breeze made by the vibrations, triggering electrical impulses that dash off to tell the brain. The bigger the vibrations, the louder the sound; and the quicker vibrations, the higher the sound. It is then the job of different parts of the brain to register and interpret these signals and try and make sense of them or ignore them.

At this point, I need to add one crucial piece of information. We can only hear sounds where the air is vibrating at least 20 times a second. For example, a bumblebee wing vibrates about 180 times a second, which is why you can hear a buzzing sound. Waving your hand around also produces sound waves but it doesn’t make the air vibrate quickly enough for us to detect a sound from it.

What’s incredible is how sensitive our ears are. We can literally hear a pin drop. We can also detect very small differences in incoming sound waves. Imagine how many different people you can identify by their voice alone, even if they say exactly the same sentence. Or think of the number of pieces of music you could name after hearing only the opening few notes or chords. Having a basic understanding of sound and hearing is useful in many ways when it comes to learning bird sounds, but for now, the main thing to remember is that nature has blessed most people with brilliant hearing apparatus and ability. When it comes to learning bird sounds, you can feel confident that you’ve got what it takes to master it.

How do birds make noises?

You only have to wander through the countryside in spring to realise that birds make incredibly varied and complex, and often loud, noises. So what ‘wonder instrument’ do they use?

To answer that question, it helps to consider how we do it; after all, we’re pretty good at making vocal sounds ourselves. Our technique is to squeeze air from our lungs out through a narrow gap between two flaps of tissue at the top of our windpipe – our voicebox, or larynx. The flap margins vibrate really quickly, between 85 and 1,000 times a second. We adeptly change the shape of the gap to alter the sound that emerges.

Secrets of the syrinx

It had long been known that birds make their noises further down the windpipe than we do, at the point where it splits to go into the lungs. This upside-down Y-shaped section of tube is called the syrinx, the Greek word meaning ‘pan pipes’.

It took until the twenty-first century, however, to discover the actual mechanism: bird sounds are created as air passes between pairs of flaps that project from the syrinx walls. Sound familiar? Yes, birds and humans create sound vibrations in a surprisingly similar way, just in different places.

The astonishing volume that some birds are capable of is in part because blowing through tiny holes can create big vibrations. However, the syrinx is also surrounded by an air sac, which acts as an amplifier.

But here’s the really clever bit: a bird has pairs of flaps at the top of both of the Y-tubes, and can control the openings independently. It means one bird can make two completely different noises at the same time.

Mechanical noises

The syrinx isn’t the only source of bird sounds; some birds also make noises using other parts of their bodies.

Beak

• Beak-to-beak rattling : In some birds, such as the Puffin, pairs face each other and clatter their beaks together in greeting, in a kind of avian nose-rub.

• Beak snapping : Several species make audible snapping noises with their beaks by closing them forcefully, especially owls but also birds as diverse as Pied Wagtails and Waxwings.

• Drumming : Great Spotted and Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers hammer a loud tattoo on tree trunks.

Wings and tail

• Wind in the wings : As birds fly, their beating wings create a rush of air, which can make an audible noise, especially so when the sounds are multiplied as a flock takes off. In a few species, however, the air moving over or through the feathers makes humming or ‘singing’ sounds. This includes the ‘singing wings’ of flying Mute Swans, Goldeneyes and Collared Doves (on take-off), and the ‘thrumming’ of Lapwing wings during its display flight.

• Wing crack : Several birds clap their wings above or below their bodies in flight, creating a loud whipcrack, including Woodpigeons, Stock Doves, Short-eared and Long-eared Owls, and Nightjars.

• Wind in the tail feathers : The Snipe has specially shaped outer tail feathers that create a throbbing hum in its display flight, which is called drumming.

Feet

• Slapping : Some birds, such as Coots and Mute Swans, slap and splash their webbed feet on the water to create a commotion.

Types of bird sound

Making sounds, and listening to sounds made by other bird species, is a major feature of most birds’ lives. The language of birds may not be speech as we know it, but you have only to listen to birds for a short while to realise the complexity and range of their vocalisations, and how it is all designed to convey information.

To try and make sense of this language, we tend to categorise sounds according to their apparent meaning, and the obvious first step is to divide them into calls and songs.

Track 3

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• Calls tend to be short and straightforward, are given by both sexes and at any time of year, and often signal some kind of intent or action. Bird calls are also thought to be innate – in other words, a bird doesn’t have to learn them and would be able to make them even if it had never met one of its own kind.

• Songs , meanwhile, tend to be longer and are mainly (but not always) given by the male, at a particular time of year, driven by hormonal changes. Bird songs are usually linked to defending a territory or attracting a mate, or both, but they have to be learnt at least to some extent. As we will see later, it is mainly the passerines, which we more commonly call ‘songbirds’, that have what we would describe as a song.

The simple division of sounds into calls and songs is not perfect but holds true much of the time. Both categories can be further subdivided, so over the following pages we explore the different types, and what – with some poetic licence – they might mean.

Be aware, however, that hardly any species has a repertoire that includes each and every category of call. The range of sounds also varies according to the age, sex, and emotional and hormonal state of a bird, and some of these sounds might be used frequently, some very rarely indeed.

Different types of calls

• Long-distance contact calls : Many birds find themselves in a situation where they want to find members of their own kind, or locate mates and family members that are distant or out of sight. An effective way to do this is to have a rather loud call that says, ‘I’m here; are you there?’ Birds in flight often give this call to see if anyone replies from the ground below, or vice versa.

• Short-distance contact calls : Birds that are close together, whether on the ground or flying as a flock, will often make quieter noises merely to say to those around them, ‘I’m still here; I’m feeling calm. There’s no danger, and all is well.’ These noises can sound somewhat conversational. In flying flocks, these calls may also be helpful for coordinating movements and are especially useful at night to keep contact in the darkness.

• Anxiety and alarm calls : Most birds need to take action many times a day to avoid danger. It is essential, therefore, to have a set of calls that send clear signals to those around them that range from ‘I’m feeling rather nervous’ through to ‘Our lives are in imminent danger’. Such calls may also signal to the predator ‘I’ve spotted you; there’s no point chasing me’. They are calls we frequently hear because we are often the cause of them! Some alarm calls are danger-specific, such as the hawk call, which many different songbirds share and which clearly identifies that the danger is a fast-flying bird of prey. If you learn this call, you’ll find more hawks and falcons as a result!

• Excitement calls : These calls tend to be louder and more intense than mere contact calls. They are typically made when there is no apparent source of danger, but something interesting is happening. Maybe a bird has chanced upon a tasty food supply, or found friends, or is sensing the time to migrate is approaching.

• Mobbing calls : These are a particular form of alarm call that signal when birds have found a roosting, predatory bird, especially an owl. They are a rallying call for other birds to come and harass the predator and to make its life so uncomfortable that it wants to leave.

• Calls to do with take-off and landing : Many birds signal their intent to take off or confirm they are doing so with distinctive calls. It ensures they don’t get left behind and that the flock remains tight and coordinated. Some birds also have a landing call.

• Calls to do with fighting : When birds get into tiffs, maybe over a mate or food, it is useful to have a threat call that says ‘Back off!’ and hence resolves the situation without resorting to fisticuffs. However, if the threat doesn’t work, the birds may have to move to full fighting calls. When one bird has won a contest, it may indulge in triumph calls, which is a feature of some swans and geese.

• Calls to do with mating : There are many calls to do with the intense moments between a pair, such as soliciting calls, calls immediately before and during copulation, and the celebratory calls afterwards.

• Calls to do with parenting : Many parents have specific calls when communicating with their offspring; some even talk to their unhatched eggs, encouraging the chicks to break free. Once the young have hatched, parents may have a call that says ‘Stay close’ or ‘Freeze!’. A few wading birds lure predators away from their chicks by feigning injury, with special calls to complete the deception. In colonial species, such as seabirds and terns, there is enough nuance within the individual calls of parents and chicks that they can recognise each other, ensuring that the right chick gets fed.

• Calls of young birds : Many chicks have ‘Feed me, feed me’ calls, some of which can be quite insistent.

Different types of song

When a bird, such as a Blackbird, sits on a favoured perch in spring and repeatedly utters beautiful bursts of sound, it is clear to us that this is singing rather than calling – these bird sounds seem full of melody, similar to our songs. But what about something like a Tawny Owl hooting – is that a song? Or the oooh of a male Eider? Or the boom of a Bittern?

There is no absolute right or wrong answer to these questions. For the purposes of this book, however, sounds that birds use to attract a mate or defend their territory are referred to as follows:

• A song when it is given by a passerine (the songbirds – larks, warblers, tits, finches, buntings, etc.), even if the song is apparently rather tuneless. Some passerines also have a song flight in which each verse is often fuller, longer and more varied than their song when perched.

• An advertising call when it is given by non-passerines such as ducks, waders and gamebirds. And if it is given as part of a visual ritual, it is distinguished as a display call .

However, where a non-passerine has a particularly melodic advertising call, such as a Cuckoo or members of the pigeon family, most people would happily call these calls a song. This book, therefore, adopts a pragmatic approach – if it has the ‘feel’ of a song, it’s called a song.

Here, we’ll also look at how birds have to practise their songs. In some species, practising like this results in what are called subsongs and plastic songs.

Who is the intended target of the song?

It is the breeding season, and a Great Tit is sitting in a tree merrily singing tee-cher tee-cher tee-cher. Is he signalling to other males nearby that this piece of territory is occupied and if they try to muscle in, they will be repelled?

The male flies to another branch and sings a different verse, wee-chee-chee wee-chee-chee. Is he pretending to be a second male to make out that this territory is jam-packed with males? Or is he showing that he is such an accomplished singer that he must be fit and experienced?

And is a female listening for the male with the best choral skills and the most extensive repertoire? Or is she seeking out the best habitat, and then mating with the male who happens to have secured it?

Well, in Great Tits we know that their song is an auditory ‘flag’ for males to demonstrate their territories to each other and that females prefer males with lots of songs. However, in other species, the relative importance of the two functions is thought to vary. The Sedge Warbler song, for example, is almost entirely linked to attracting a mate, but when male Black Grouse (below) gather at their lek, a traditional sparring arena, their ‘cat among the pigeons’ display calls help determine who gets the best spot on the dance floor, and the females then choose the male in the prime position.

Subsongs and practice

You may think that birds emerge from the egg with their songs already hard-wired into them, ready to use at the start of the next breeding season. But for songbirds at least (the passerines), this appears not to be the case: song is something that must be learned.

The first lesson begins as soon as young males (and, in a few species, young females) hear the songs of the adult birds around them, which could be when they are still chicks in the nest. While at this stage they may not make any attempt to copy what they hear, the patterns of the songs apparently begin to lodge in the young birds’ brains.

The process of then practising these patterns out loud goes through three stages that merge one into the other:

1.Subsong: Often in its first autumn but also into early spring of the next year, a young bird may sit, alone and self-absorbed, singing a rambling, introspective mumble with little structure and little resemblance to what it will ultimately become.

2.Plastic song: Then, during its first full spring, a bird develops its subsong to the point where it sounds more assured and the verses are more structured. However, at this stage the bird is still trying out different versions of its song.

3.Crystallised song: Finally, the bird settles on several verses that will form its set repertoire. In the Yellowhammer, one male can have as few as two verses that it uses, whereas a Robin may have more than a hundred. What we are now discovering, however, is that ‘crystallisation’ isn’t as rigid as was once thought and that males of many species can continue to refine and augment their repertoire as they get older and more experienced.

Dialects

Just as people in different parts of the country have words, phrases and grammar that are peculiar to them, so populations of birds in a particular area can share the same verses and other sounds. These are known as dialects.

Sometimes these variations can be on a tiny geographical scale, such as in the Corn Bunting (right), where a population of 30–100 males sings its own unique song verses, different from those of neighbours barely a few miles away. The reason for this, in evolutionary terms, isn’t clear, but it does appear that young female Corn Buntings may choose to mate with males singing a different dialect, helping to avoid inbreeding.

Dialects can also present on a larger geographical scale. Chaffinch ‘rain calls’ here, for example – those monotonous ‘lazy songs’ of the male – may sound different in Scotland to those in the Midlands or southern England. So if you go abroad on your holiday, don’t expect familiar birds always to sound the same as they do back home.

Imitation

When a Starling sings from your rooftop, it is easy to ignore its blips and whistles, pops and creaks. However, if you do stop and listen, you find that sometimes woven into its experimental electronics it will include quite astonishing imitations of other sounds.

It may be the call of a Buzzard or gull – birds that the male Starling might have heard flying over your house. However, he may include calls that he must have heard somewhere else, such as those of a Lapwing or Common Tern, or even sounds from the human environment – perhaps a mobile phone or even snatches of a human voice.

It is not only Starlings that mimic the sounds of other species: Wheatears can be fantastic at it; Jays frequently imitate Buzzards; Reed Warblers often start their songs with a few bursts of maybe Oystercatcher, Swallow or Bearded Tit; and I’ve even had a Robin in my garden repeatedly pull off an excellent Greenfinch impression.

Our best imitator is, sadly, incredibly rare in this country: the Marsh Warbler. One male can have a repertoire of the sounds of more than 80 different birds, including European species from its breeding grounds and African birds that it must have heard in the winter.

So why do birds imitate each other? It appears that the main reason is to show off! The females in some species love to find a mate with a vast repertoire, and what better way for him to increase the number of songs he can perform than by stealing some from other birds.

Duetting

A few bird species have a rather endearing quality in which the pairs sing or call together. The most usual form of duetting is where one bird starts and the other then follows, which is called antiphonal duetting.

Sadly, none of our birds is quite as accomplished as the Happy Wrens of Mexico are, which finish each other’s sentences. However, we do have duetting geese, divers, grebes and White-tailed Eagles. My favourite, though, is the Crane: one bird will trumpet, sparking an instant reflex response in the other bird, such that if you didn’t know otherwise it might sound like a single bird. It all helps create and reinforce a solid pair bond which, in a species like the Crane, is vital because each chick will need the support of both parents over many years to have any chance of surviving.

How to describe bird sounds

The building blocks of birdsong

The first thing we need to describe the sounds we hear is a consistent terminology.

The songs we sing are typically made up of a chain of notes that form clear sections: an introduction, verse, chorus and an ending. Bird songs and calls are not so narrowly defined, but it is possible to agree on some simple terms:

• Song : A bird’s song consists of the full range of verses it sings. A very few species have a couple of song types, where one set of verses sounds very different from another. For example, the Wood Warbler has one song type that sounds like a spinning coin and another that sounds like a sweet py u py u py u .

• Verse : This is one burst of song, with a defined start and end. Some species sing short verses, lasting little longer than a second; a few have very long verses, such as the continual outpouring of song from a Skylark. Some birds repeat their verses exactly; others sing a new verse each time.

• Notes : Each verse a bird sings is made up of a series of notes. For the purposes of this book, a note is not usually as simple as the single-pitched notes that make up most human music, but the note is still the basic unit in birdsong. So, for example, a Cuckoo sings two notes: ku k u .

• Phrase : In some species, the verses are made up of distinct groups of notes called phrases. Sometimes these phrases are repeated. In the case of the Song Thrush, its song seems to be one repeated phrase after another with pauses in between.

• Couplets/triplets : This is a two-note or three-note repeated phrase, such as the tee-cher tee-cher of the Great Tit.

• Syllable : This is where each unit of pronunciation has one vowel sound. For example, the typical call of the Chiffchaff is a one-syllable hweet , while that of its close relative, the Willow Warbler, is a more disyllabic hoo-eet .

• Repertoire : This is the overall sum of all the different calls and verses that one individual bird or species makes.

Sounds and spelling

Are you wondering why, for example, the sound of the Cuckoo is written as ku-ku? This book uses simple pronunciation rules to give you a good idea of how to read transcribed bird sounds. Check out the guide here, which sets out the simple pronunciation rules used throughout this book.

Sonograms

Later we will start to see how useful it can be when sounds are converted into images called sonograms. Sonograms are like a graph – time runs along the horizontal axis and pitch (see here) on the vertical axis – conveying more complexity and precision in a few squiggles than a page of words ever can.

A true sonogram often looks full of smudges, which indicate the sound of recorded wind and other background noise. To help you recognise and understand bird songs and calls more clearly, we’ve created simplified sonograms like this:

The seven attributes of sound

The next step is to describe what a bird song or call sounds like. Listen to Track 4, the song verse of a mystery bird, and try to describe it. Unless you are experienced, the likelihood is that you will find it quite tricky to put it into words. It is a kind of twittering, but can you say more than that?

The secret to describing bird sounds is that every sound a bird makes has the same set of attributes and you can focus on one attribute at a time. The seven attributes I find most helpful, and which we will return to again and again in this book, are:

1.Duration: How long does the sound last? Do the bird’s song verses ramble on without it drawing breath or are they brief and succint? Duration can also refer to the length of individual notes and