At 7am there were two robins on the electrical cords. They were fairly quiet until a few other small birds joined them. Then, everyone started singing together. I can identify six different songs, including the robin song, even though I can't see all the varieties. I can't record them, but I can try and transcribe them:
"kakakakakakaka"
"tweet tweet" (there are at least two different pitches I can here, which might belong to different varieties of birds or to two individuals of the same species.)
"papao pa, papao pa" (those are doves)
"Aa Aa Aa" (these are two syllables each, with the first syllable higher in pitch than the second one)
"pip pip pip pipipipip"
"kaaaaaaa kaaaaaaa" (each of these has a downslurring pitch)
[Aside #1: I remember having a birding guide that included similar verbal transcriptions of the bird sounds and thinking it was a fairly poor system of conveying sounds. It turns out that now people use audio pitch tracers, which can render the songs into MIDI files and then transcribe them as sheet music. That also enables them to test for frequency, volume, pitch, etc. For a place like my backyard, you'd need an editing system that would enable you to isolate the song of the particular bird from those of other birds]
[Aside #2: 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen transcribed and used actual birdsongs for his piece Oiseaux Exotiques. Very cool!]
[Aside #3: when the house predators chatter at the birds, are they trying to imitate them? The chatter pattern changes quite a bit, but since I'd been listening to it from the perspective of the cats, not of the birds, I hadn't sought a mimicry explanation. Now that I'm focusing on the birds, I should remember to pay attention in the future to what exactly it is that the predator at home is responding to.]
UPDATE: Despite there being no activity on the electric cords, I stayed until 9am and listened to the songs, which continued in the same pattern. I also noticed interesting things about flight, which I'll detail in the next post.
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