Happy Easter! FOY Eastern Phoebe. Electronic Bird Guides

On a walk this beautiful Easter morning along an old railroad trail I saw my first Eastern Phoebe this year,

Electronic Bird Guides

The three electronic bird guides for the iPhone/iPod currently available are: the National Geographic Handheld Birds, the iBird Explorer Pro and the Sibley eGuide. They are meant for use in the field to quickly check field marks and are not for identifying a bird from scratch. I believe for most of us the illustrations, along with the audio, are the  features by which we judge them. For comparison I looked at the Snow Bunting (which I chose for no particular reason) in each guide and made screen shots of all illustrations for this particular bird.  The size of the illustrations are of course limited by screen size and the size of the headers, footers or sidebars which I did not include.

National Geographic HHB

iBird Explorer Pro includes both drawings, and photos whose number are limited by what is in their database. All of them are also available on their website.  

The Sibley eGuide shows all illustrations included in the hardcover book and provides the most complete picture of the various types of  plumage.

I have used all of them but have come to prefer the Sibley guide over the others. What clinched it for me was the completeness of the audio samples, It alone allows you to scroll through snippets of songs and calls from various locations and seasons whereas the other guides include only one representative audio sample for each species.  For example Snow Buntings:  songs #1_AK, songs #2_AK, subsong in winter flock_NY, winter flock calls #1_NY,  winter flock calls #2_NY, and harsh scold_AK

Good birding!

The Buds of Spring

We don't have a garden, with the dogs and all, but I do have a small plot on the side of the driveway where Rhubarb grows. It comes back year after year. It's indestructible despite being driven on and plowed over, so full of life nothing can stand in its way.

What's that sound at dusk? American Woodcock mating calls

It's an odd sound; loud and piercing...you'd never suspect it comes from a bird but a monstrous frog, or ueber-insect*. You'd never guess it's from a homey-looking butterball of a bird.  

For the past three evenings I have been listening to a Woodcock peenting nearby in a low lying wet area of tangled brush, fallen trees and small clearings,  advertising his position to local females. Last night, using a flashlight, I finally got a glimpse of him standing amidst clumps of dead weeds and last year's grass. 

At dusk  I'd see him rising high up in the air and spiralling in wide circles all the while making a twittering, whistling sound with his wings. After a while the twitters change to chirping, gradually getting louder, then silence as the bird descends among the trees to land in a clearing

Chester A. Reed, The Bird Book, 1915

I managed to get a recording of the song. Here is snippet of the spectrogram. and wave pattern 

There are four types of sounds: the thin nasal  buzzy "peent" call preceded by a barely audible "tuko" sound, the twittering made by the wings during sharp turns, and the vocal chirping during during aerial flight which becomes louder as the bird descends. The last part of the descent is silent. Then a soft fluttering of the wings as the bird lands.

I have been holding off publishing this to try to get a photo, going out at dusk every day but no luck. The first day was the best one in that the bird landed not 5 feet from me, but my camera was not in position. I got a good look at him though, as he was standing in the grass, making soft "tuko" sounds, that sound to me  like the cooing of a dove, only much briefer. After a couple of minutes he started "peenting", sounding like a sharp ripping and tearing of paper.

Anyway I never got that lucky again. Every night he always appeared just at the opposite end of the clearing from where I had positioned myself. . Although I was then able to approach him to within a few feet, by that time it was too dark, despite the almost full moon, to focus my camera - so I got just a bunch of blurry pictures of weeds and shrub. ..

The moon however was beautiful.

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*It's not in the dictionary. I took if from Nietzsche's "Uebermensch", or superman.