That's an excellent recording, Doug! I've always
admired their song but never heard it so clearly.
I think our cowbirds here (Los Angeles County)
sound exactly the same. But I've never listened
to a cowbird song slowed down before. I tried
half-speed, and he sounds like a bongo drum in
those throaty preludes-to-whistles! The whistles
are interesting too =97 some of them are "three
syllables" when slowed down. I was interested to
hear how the throaty preludes are not all the
same (and I'm using "prelude" loosely =97 not all
of them are followed by a whistle, of course).
A search on http://animalbehaviorarchive.org/
brings up some definite variations. Of course, to
slow those down you'll need to rerecord them
through "Stereo Mix" (or whatever your sound
driver calls it) or use Virtual Audio Cable or something like it.
David
At 2008-05-17 12:40, Doug Von Gausig wrote:
>Today a single male Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) sat in the tree
>outside my office and began to sing. I started recording and became
>fascinated by the variations I could hear in his songs and whistles. I've
>posted an MP3 of the song/whistle performance, and two resampled clips of
>his songs and whistles slowed to 1/3 normal speed. These resampled clips
>let you really hear the subtle differences in his songs and whistles. They
>are at:
><http://www.naturesongs.com/paruicte.html#bhco,>http://www.naturesongs.com=
/paruicte.html#bhco,
>beginning with "A
>single male..."
>
>I'd like to hear others' recordings of this species from other territories=
,
>to see how dialectic they might be.
>
>Doug
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