At 11:50 PM 7/17/2007, David Ellsworth wrote:
>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 Spar=
row.
>
>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>http://tinyurl.com/2sutwy or
><http://ad2004.hku.nl/naturesound/David_Ellsworth/2007_04_03%2018_40%20PDT=
%20-%20White-crowned%20Sparrow%20song%20+%20subsong.mp3>http://ad2004.hku.n=
l/naturesound/David_Ellsworth/2007_04_03%2018_40%20PDT%20-%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.
That's all pretty typical of White-crowned Sparrows, David. They have a
huge vocabulary and are famous for trying new things. Their dialects are
also very specific to a region. I call this subsong, whisper song or just
"chatter".
Next time, you might try to resample the original to 22,050, convert to
mono before going to MP3 - that will save a lot of bandwidth and not lose=
any necessary quality.
I hope you keep paying attention to White-crowns, they're worth the effort.
Doug
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Doug Von Gausig
Digitally Recorded Birds Sounds at:
http://naturesongs.com/birds.html
Clarkdale, Central Arizona, USA
e-mail:
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