Unearthly howling from the spruce grove

Please pardon this post’s dearth of photos. As species diversity declines with the first frosts, numbers climb, and I was so busy racking up high numbers this past week that I only remembered at the last minute to snap a single pic of what it’s all about.

Chwit?

Exhibit A:

If you listen to the end of this recording I made on Oct 8 (apologies for the softness; listen for what’s under the Blue Jay), you’ll find out the identity of the agitated warbler making the longest series of chwits I’ve heard this species make in our field. As a geographer, I’m flattered that the bird’s name contains a place, but as in other place-name references (Tennessee Warbler, Kentucky Warbler) it does not really capture the essence of the bird. I wouldn’t be dismayed if the name were changed to something more like what the bird calls itself, or what other birds call it. Hold on; I’ll explain.

As the editor of our state bird journal, I am looking forward with some trepidation to the implementation of sweeping changes to bird taxonomy that will remove references to people from all US common names (think, no more Cooper’s Hawk or Wilson’s Warbler). This approach from the authorities is a way of sidestepping fraught discussions over which names should be changed so as not to refer to historical figures who are now perceived as problematic. I’ll leave that part for another post, as it’s tangential to an idea that hit me the other day: what if, in the name of fairness, the gold standard for common bird nomenclature (leaving Latin names aside, of course) were to seek out names that the birds might actually apply to themselves or each other?

As the youth say, What Does That Even Mean?

What I mean is that recent strides in research on bird cognition have demonstrated that birds think, feel, and speak. People far wiser than modern scientists have of course known this for millennia, as does anyone who has spent time with a parrot or what have you. We now know that birds such as chickadees warn members of their own species as well as other species about the presence of a danger such as an accipiter. Such warning systems, whether deployed by tits, corvids, vireos, or other scolding species, must of necessity inform about the identity of the danger. This entails a signifier—some sound or combination of sounds that is recognizable to and thus shared by a population of listeners. Such a signifier would be, in essence, an interspecies name for the threat.

I then wondered what attributes of a bird would best represent it to other birds? One strong possibility is onomatopoeia, which we humans also use to signify birds (“Killdeer” is an example of one that has survived eons of taxonomy updates unscathed). As mnemonic devices, I would favor, as I indicated with the example of the Chwit Warbler, the recovery of as many of these imitative names as possible. We already know that not a few birds themselves spend a fair amount of time mimicking others anyway, so it is too much of a stretch to wonder whether they are referencing these birds by name when they do so? (I’m tempted to spend all my time just studying starlings, as I’ve noticed recently that when they gather every day at dawn they tend to include imitations of recently arrived migrants in their conversations, almost as if these were run-downs of what’s new out there.)

Now, you may be wondering why we might want to try to determine what signifiers birds have for each other and attempt to apply them ourselves. It’s not a trivial issue, as responsible naming is all about control, ownership, and identity, key concerns we also have about our own societies. Studies now show that humans and birds have co-evolved languages over at least tens of millennia (such as that shared by honeyguides and honey-gatherers in East Africa, and there are no doubt countless other examples), so humans at one point participated more actively in interspecies communication with wild animals, as we do today with our domestics. Might discovering more appropriate names bring us closer to the birds themselves? Yes, “Cooper’s” means something to us, but it has nothing whatsoever to offer the bird itself. The name almost makes the bird our property, which it is anything but.

Another reason is translation across cultures. I spent my younger years in Honduras at the vanguard of the birding movement there, working with English-language guidebooks that were the only resources available at the time. For “warbler,” we had the onomatopoeic “chipe”, but then we had to tack on “Wilson’s” or “Kentucky” which made no sense whatsoever to people. This was in cases where birds had no local names; when they did, we settled on one of those. And, guess what, in the majority of cases these were onomatopoeic. Where we had the Red-lored Parrot, they had the frijol; where we had the White-fronted Parrot, they had the fuetete, and so forth. Their names were based on the flight calls; ours on plumage characteristics determined by a taxonomist. (Some of these, of course, are shared, like the chachalacas.)

If you’ll permit my flight of fancy a few more lines: the worst compromise decision I can think of are the neutral but clunky names relying on physical characteristics, which in birds, more often than not, are male-biased anyway. Which gender has the yellow throat, the red breast, the white wings…? These names are typically unevocative and not poetic at all, at least to my ears. But who knows—maybe birds also use physical characteristics as name signifiers.

We are in our infancy in understanding what birds are expressing when they vocalize, particularly because they do so as part of an interwoven system of expression that includes body language such as flight movements, displays, color flashes, and so forth even odor). It could be that they name each other (and, I suppose, us, though I shudder to think) by actions as much as by vocalizations or plumage characteristics. In this case, we can assume corvids have many names for us humans: Forest Destroyer, for example. I’m certainly OK with some of the cooler tropical names: foliage-gleaner, leaftosser, even tapaculo (look it up).

Just please, Naming Committees, don’t ever touch the perfect, nonsensical name of the Unspotted Saw-whet Owl.

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Timing Is Everything

Back here on Bird Mountain, you will recall that the last post happened right after we crawled out from under 11 days of rain. We narrowly missed losing the biggest NFC night of the year to a power outage—and, as it turns out, we could easily have missed species #198 for the year. At 7:38 PM on Oct 2, a rather unimpressive Dickcissel was picked up, six calendar days off from when we garnered the sole 2023 record, Oct 8th (there were several records, spring and fall, during 2022, the first NFC year). This was definitely lucky, as the one-week-ahead rule means that by the time the same time arrives as last year, it’s too late. And sure enough.

By October 7, the weather had turned clear and dry and the mornings were getting colder. Bug populations were dropping, and bird species were dwindling rapidly and then absenting themselves on a daily basis. Then, on the 10th, patchy frost appeared in the field; the next day, the frost was a bit harder. The weather has turned warmer, but it’s too late: the witch hazels are in full bloom, leaves are cascading, and the goldenrods are gray. The very last Chwit Warbler was present on the 8th, gone by the 10th. A tiny flock of Chimney Swifts appeared the morning of the 7th, then were gone; the Fish Crows have receded; warbler after warbler species is dropping off the map. I scoured the mountain on Saturday the 12th, but found not a single Magnolia nor Black-throated Blue, and tiny numbers of most others—Tennessee, Black-throated Green, Cape May—and only in their most highly preferred locations. As I predicted, the 1-week-ahead rule meant that towhee numbers were way down, some 10-20% of where they were during the deluge.

It was initially with some surprise, then, that a text from Eric on Oct 11 sharing BirdCast numbers for the night before indicated around 1.6 million birds passing over Blair County—way more than the sparse numbers estimated for the previous week. But by the time I went over tape this morning, I already knew what it was going to say. You can probably figure this out easily, as well, based on what happened yesterday.

Glorious Cacophony

The day started at the balcony in town, with a confused Song Sparrow seemingly blown out of the sky, fluttering around the large propane gas tank, calling. Never saw that before. More Song Sparrows fluttered about the junkyard, spouting bits of subsong. This type of overflow from better habitat often suggests a fallout, so I was expecting the fields to be alive with Songs. Something entirely different happened.

Backing up a bit, I already knew, from an experience I had on Thursday, that kinglets were peaking in the woods. I had led Blair County native Michael David, possessor of Pennsylvania’s 5th highest all-time species total, in search of one of his Blair nemesis birds, the Barred Owl. This was inspired by the caterwauling of Barreds from up in the spruce grove at dawn on the 8th, as a Northern Saw-whet Owl called from another direction. Barred Owls here do some familiar Who cooks for you? calls when the mood strikes, but more often than not engage in blood-curdling howls, whoops, and screeches that would make Boris Karloff proud. This was never more evident than on the 8th.

I had taken Michael up to the grove well before dawn, but no amount of imitation could summon the demon, so to speak. Michael needs to see a bird for it to be a first record, so the stakes were higher than normal (plus, I almost never feel the need to actually go find this species, so I wasn’t sure how to find it before it found me). A bit after sunrise, I had played some screech-owl, and then we had packed up and started to walk down. Immediately, a Barred Owl that had been lured in and was quietly perching on a limb exploded silently back into what was left of the Sapsucker Ridge canopy. The glimpse wasn’t diagnostic for Michael, and we couldn’t located it again, so we took a chance on another area they hang out, down along Bird Count, Greenbriar, and Ten Springs trails.

While there, we had noticed the forest seething with birds, particularly kinglets. Remember, this was the day before the 1.6-million night. Finally, almost on cue, the Hollow Barred took off in plain view and glided down toward the road.

Returning to Saturday, what started as a planned 3-hour walk before work ended up in an exhausting but productive six hours. The first clue about the identity of the 1.6 million came after Dogwood Knoll, in the first thick patch of barberry. Dozens of White-throated Sparrows exploded upslope, skittishly curious, as they always are. After that, every patch of thick whatever had a flock: 50 here, 100 there, all the way to the Far Field. Even as it warmed up and got quiet, a few screech-owl notes were enough to cause a cloud of them to rise up out of what had appeared to be a barren location, chipping in excitement.

When I realized the woods were filled with birds, I went into sit-and-count mode, as most of the individuals were in discrete, mixed-species flocks a few hundred feet apart. I moved from one flock to the next, plumping down in each place, until my brain was throbbing with the high-pitched calls of creepers, kinglets, and tits mixed with a plethora of all species of woodpeckers, the single vireo species left, robins, jays, wrens, and all the rest.

There were no rarities and no surprise holdovers, and species numbers for the day barely topped 50, which is what can be detected before 6 AM in May. But numbers for the hotspot, and by extension in some cases for the county, were at all-time highs:

• White-throated Sparrow, 770

• Tufted Titmouse, 63 (Black-capped Chickadees were also very high in numbers; they were usually in mixed migrant flocks and almost certainly included some out-of-towners)

• Red-bellied Woodpecker, 24 (though not true migrants, the species does engage in more local movements)

• Blue-headed Vireo, 15 (singing, in many cases)

• Carolina Wren, 18 (local movers? they were all quite vocal)

• Brown Creeper, 14

Though it should be obvious by now, consider that the total number of individuals I recorded was 1,610, up to 1,300 of which could have been migrants arriving recently. In conclusion, I’m guessing that up to 1 million of the global population of around 140 million White-throats passed over the county Thursday night. The NFC recordings back me up: they were mostly this species, with only a scattering of others.

(As for the Song Sparrows deluging Tyrone, they were almost entirely absent from the fields up top.)

It is now literally all downhill for here to late January, as we wait for waterfowl and gulls and the two more new species that will make 200 not the nearly unattainable number it was two years ago but rather an expected annual total.