“He spent a lot of time flying. He learnt to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
I suspect most bird chatter is about sex, not flying.
Like when you're out in the summer evening, and the crickets are chirping and the frogs are croaking, and you realise it's just a whole bunch of males shouting "hey baby, over here!"
I got a bird feeder a little while ago. After watching them closer that I had in the past, I realized something. All that chirping going on either means "Have sex with me" or "Go away, this is mine."
All the chirping I had ever heard basically means the same thing as most of what my peers were saying in junior high.
> It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.
As much as I like Douglas Aadms, this statement is just wrong. A lot of bird chatter is songs to demarcate territory, threat warnings, contact calls to maintain flock awareness, young birds saying 'feed me', and others.
I know when a cat has entered my garden by the clucking warning calls that the blackbirds make. They make a different warning noise when I interrupt them on my bird feeder. Sometimes I'm alerted to a buzzard by the calls of rooks who are ganging up on it.
You might have preferred his description of Kakapo-speak in Last Chance to See then
> “The booming [mating call] is deep, very deep, just on the threshold of what you can actually hear and what you can feel. This means that it carries for very great distances, but that you can’t tell where it’s coming from. If you’re familiar with certain types of stereo setups, you’ll know that you can get an additional speaker called a sub-woofer which carries only the bass frequencies and which you can, in theory, stick anywhere in the room, even behind the sofa. The principle is the same: you can’t tell where the bass sound is coming from.
> The female kakapo can’t tell where the booming is coming from either, which is something of a shortcoming in a mating call. “Come and get me!” “Where are you?” “Come and get me!” “Where the hell are you?” “Come and get me!” “Look, do you want me to come or not?” “Come and get me!” “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” “Come and get me!” “Go and stuff yourself” is roughly how it would go in human terms.”
(I once emailed Adams asking when this book would be published in paperback, this was back when the Internet was small enough that one could sleuth and guess nearly anything. He responded three years later, saying that Random House had published it with "the worst cover I've seen in my career.")
Yeah, true. But I've seen three bird calls that don't fit that pattern in my garden. Long tail tits seem to move around in small flocks, probably eating the insects in my trees. Every few seconds one of the flock flies to another tree. If the others don't follow, it flies back. While this is happening there is a constant chorus of little chirps. My guess is that they feel "attracted" to the centroid of the chirps, as a simple, almost mechanical way to keep the flock together (its hard to see each other amongst all the branches).
The other case is juvenile magpies. As adults I mostly hear them shouting aggressively at each other. But if the youngsters don't know I'm there, I've sometimes heard them chatting. The sounds they make are complex and quiet. A bit like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P4ZVgjslVQ but I've always seen them in pairs or groups when doing this.
Third is the Robin (European). They also have a whisper song. Sometimes they do it so quietly that I have to be within a few feet to hear it. And there's no other bird around. I guess it's a male who is just working on new material to impress the ladies with later.
I recently had a finch(i think) nest underneath my window AC unit and one of the parents caught a cold for about one week. I heard more calls from that specific bird throughout the time, it was much squeakier while making what sounded like normal calls. It made me think that they relay info on frequencies that our ears dont tune into. Just a hypothesis, but was interesting to hear more inbetween sounds that the other birds didn't make. Could also just be a sort of mask for birds, a call that says 'hey Im sick stay away.' Although I think it'd be obvious for them from the change of voice.
Overall it was interesting to listen to them communicate with their young ones. The nest is constantly chirping unless they get warning calls then it gets super quiet until their folks let them know danger has passed.
It was unfortunate when I had to replace the unit, at least I waited for the young ones to start flying. My new unit is half the size and they disliked the new roof I tried building to mimic the size of the old one. I wish them luck. Tough little fellars.
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything