Birds Songs saving me from the Doldrums of Summer. Here is Quiz #2

   

I know it's time to take the feeder down, but I am still getting loads of visitors, especially Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, five males yesterday afternoon, along with several females and juveniles.  I have been taking lots of pics, but the one I like best, I took a couple of years ago. It shows the underside of the wings.

Bird songs have saved me from the doldrums of summer. Birds may have disappeared from view, hidden by dense foliage, but they are still audible and still present a challenge to identification. So here is Bird Song Quiz # 2:

The first two birds are almost identical in appearance and are often told apart only by their songs. (false, see correction in comment section) Both are found in brushy moist habitat near streams or in bogs or marshes. They are usually solitary.

One:

Two:                                                 

Three: This one is a mystery to me - haven't been able to figure it out. The song is difficult to hear, extremely high pitched. I heard the bird singing from a thicket near a cornfield and next to a river trail.

Four: This one is a plain bird with a pretty song, usually solitary in a large tree near water.

Five: A small bird, reddish brown overall, with long whitish eyebrow, recorded singing from a tall oak tree in my backyard.

I am going to post the answers to the quiz in the comment section in two days, except of course song #3. I hope one of you can identify that one for me!

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Celebrating my One-year Anniversary! Bird Song Quiz

First of all I 'd like to thank all of you who are reading my blog, who have commented on it and who signed up as followers. Having an audience makes the blog come alive for me --  I am not just talking to myself. Of course, I reciprocate by visiting your blog and leave comments. I am happy to be a member of this great worldwide birding community.  

I started this blog a year ago after I witnessed the terrible toll taken on Northern Gannet chicks and adult birds by abandoned fishing nets. Until then I had just been posting my bird photos on my website, but with the blog I had hoped to make more people aware of the plight of these sea birds.

So, I started it as a pure birding blog, but lately I have also included some observations on nature and art. These are the two poles of my life: art and science. I started out as a free lance artist, before switching to medicine. Now it's time again to attend to my creative side, not in painting and drawing as before, but in photography.

Although identifying warblers by their songs continues to be a tremendous challenge, sometimes I luck out in getting a photo of one. This Blackburnian Warbler was sitting on the weathered top of a conifer basking in the morning sun.

But most of the time, with the foliage so dense, all I can do is trying to identify birds by their songs in the recordings that I bring home. It's a challenge; I try to match them up with birds most likely to be present. Over the past year I have collected a number of recordings and thought it would be fun to post some of them as a quiz. Some of them are quite easy, others are more difficult. The last one is an unknown to me. My answers are in the comment section.

First, a bird announces his approach to my feeder:

Second, heard from near the top of a neighbor's tall trees

Third, heard deep in a conifer forest.

Fourth, not a song but the call of a colorful bird at home in the upper reaches of a deciduous forest.

Fifth, the plaintive call of a mother looking for her chicks.

Sixth, heard near a pond in a forest.

Seventh, heard in a wooded area. It sounds easy, but I can't figure it out. If you have the answer, please let me know what it is!

On Hogback Mountain a field of ferns


Thanks for stopping by and please leave a comment, whether in answer to the quiz or just because...

Garden of Eden

People hunger for nature. This is shown in a hilarious yet thought-provoking study undertaken by two Russian artists, Komar and Melamid, who polled people in various countries all over the world to find out what type of painting they would most like to hang on their walls. They set about constructing schematic paintings based on these polls. In their book "Painting by Numbers, a Scientific Guide to Art" page after page shows groups of people in bucolic scenes with lakes, blue mountains, trees, and animals. Their Garden of Eden. Two examples:

America's Most Wanted

Iceland's Most Wanted

But I am being sidetracked.  I wanted to talk about a SVAS guided walk with Marlboro College biologist Bob Engel a couple of days ago on the beautiful trails of Hogback Mountain, a defunct ski resort which closed in 1989 and  has gradually been reverting back to wilderness.

Overgrown Ski Trail

The air was filled with bird songs, but we only caught brief glimpses of the  warblers darting through the dense foliage as they gleaned small critters from the leaves and bark.  Species included  Ovenbird, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Blackburnian Warbler, Black-throated Blue Warbler... .  I was able to record a couple of songs:

Black-throated Blue Warbler song and Spectrogram:

And here, the Ovenbird's emphatic "Teacher Teacher Teacher" song

I confess, this walk showed me up as a complete newbie in bird song identification. There is so much to learn! I am finding out  my ears are not very good at picking up the warblers' high-pitched buzzy sounds.

Bob Engel is a gifted guide and teacher with a vast fund of knowledge. During our walk he commented on the polygynous nature of male Red-winged Blackbirds, on why scat deposited prominently on a rock, was probably left there by a Gray Fox, and on many other subjects prompted by what we encountered. He pointed out a small, rather drab looking plant which upon a closer look turned out to be a Horsetail (Exquisetum), one of the most ancient plants going back to the age of dinosaurs and  predating the appearance of grasses as ground cover and understory plant. It has a world-wide distribution. I remember playing with a plant like that as a child, pulling sections apart and sliding them back together.

He pointed out the most invasive species in the Northeast, the Japanese Knotweed,  which was forming a dense thicket at the edge of a field, sending out satellite colonies far into the field by deep rhizomes. Because of its extensive root system herbicides are required for eradication.

We looked at a meadow made more beautiful by dainty yellow Buttercup intermingling with the grasses. But Buttercup, it turns out, is poisonous to livestock. Once it takes posssession of a meadow the grass can no longer be used for hay. Of course Bobolinks, threatened by habitat loss, building their nests in high grass, benefit from fields being left uncut.  

Vermont is beautiful any time of the year, but it is truly glorious in June.