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Unusual White-crowned Sparrow song (subsong interspersed)

Subject: Unusual White-crowned Sparrow song (subsong interspersed)
From: "David Ellsworth" davidells
Date: Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:56 pm ((PDT))
Back in April, I heard this song coming from my
backyard, so I went out with my Telinga parabolic
mic to record it.  It's an unsual song to begin
with =97 but what I totally didn't expect was what
I heard upon aiming the parabolic!  The sparrow
was interspersing a repeated song phrase with
rhythmic peeps at various pitches... I'm calling
it "subsong", although I'm not sure if it's a proper use of this term.

After recording pure audio for a while, I raced
to set up my video camera to record video and
parabolic mic audio simultaneously, but only
managed to get a glimpse of the bird before he*
stopped singing. My look confirmed that he was an adult White-crowned Sparr=
ow.

I'm posting a 3:25 clip, so if anybody has
bandwidth issues with this please tell me and
I'll be glad to post a smaller one... but I think
that the range of variation (including the
vocalization the bird did during "pauses") is
part of what makes this fascinating. I've
preserved the pauses, and the only editing I've
done is a slight lower-band frequency cutoff.

Here's the clip: http://tinyurl.com/2sutwy or
http://ad2004.hku.nl/naturesound/David_Ellsworth/2007_04_03%2018_40%20PDT%2=
0-%20White-crowned%20Sparrow%20song%20+%20subsong.mp3
Recorded on 2007 April 3 at 6:40pm PDT, with a
Telinga PRO5W Stereo-DAT, using my Sony HDR-HC1 as an audio recorder.

Has anybody heard anything like this?  Any
insights as to why the bird was singing like this?


*or she? I'm not discounting the possibility,
given that this singing was quite unsual.





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