![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanSo it's finally spring, and for the last several weeks robins, house finches, bluejays, and cardinals have been singing and calling. The chickadees are weirdly silent and I'm a bit worried about them, but we did hear demands for "cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" earlier in the year.
The robins have been very actively singing. For the last week or so, I've heard one that didn't sound like the others. I began to wonder. Eventually, while still related to a robin's song, it just went completely over the top like a highly operatic rendition of a simple folk song. A day or so after that, I heard in the gloaming the high thin cry of, no, not a Siamese cat, but a gray catbird.
This morning at dawn I was awakened by Saffron's abrupt exit from under the quilt, or else by a very loud buzzy trilly song with melodious intervals that went on, with variations and possibly from at least two different sources, for at least an hour. The catbirds had finished their training and were prepared to perform concerts. They have been doing this intermittently all day. There was a brief period in which cardinals, like hawkers at the intermission of an Elizabethan play, cried, "What cheer?" for a while. But then the catbirds began again.
They seemed to be right on my bedroom windowsill, and the cats absolutely thought so too. Invisibility not being a known trait of catbirds, though they are skilled at yelling at you from dense shrubbery, I stared out the window until I saw movement in the ash tree across our neighbor to the north's back yard, and then got out the binoculars. Yes! Catbird!
We have had a single catbird before, and I always welcome it. I wonder how many there are this year.
Here are some images of a gray catbird, though the ones we get here seldom have a red patch under their tails:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Gray_Catbird/id
And here are some sound files:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Gray_Catbird/sounds
The first file, of the catbird song, is not unlike our catbirds, though ours have more robin in them at the moment. For the cat cry, the call recorded in New York is most like ours. I was startled by some of the others, which were less Siamese and more pure meow.
I was going to add a robin's song for comparison, but none of the ones I could find was as melodious and meditative as the ones we have in my neighborhood.
Pamela
The robins have been very actively singing. For the last week or so, I've heard one that didn't sound like the others. I began to wonder. Eventually, while still related to a robin's song, it just went completely over the top like a highly operatic rendition of a simple folk song. A day or so after that, I heard in the gloaming the high thin cry of, no, not a Siamese cat, but a gray catbird.
This morning at dawn I was awakened by Saffron's abrupt exit from under the quilt, or else by a very loud buzzy trilly song with melodious intervals that went on, with variations and possibly from at least two different sources, for at least an hour. The catbirds had finished their training and were prepared to perform concerts. They have been doing this intermittently all day. There was a brief period in which cardinals, like hawkers at the intermission of an Elizabethan play, cried, "What cheer?" for a while. But then the catbirds began again.
They seemed to be right on my bedroom windowsill, and the cats absolutely thought so too. Invisibility not being a known trait of catbirds, though they are skilled at yelling at you from dense shrubbery, I stared out the window until I saw movement in the ash tree across our neighbor to the north's back yard, and then got out the binoculars. Yes! Catbird!
We have had a single catbird before, and I always welcome it. I wonder how many there are this year.
Here are some images of a gray catbird, though the ones we get here seldom have a red patch under their tails:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Gray_Catbird/id
And here are some sound files:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Gray_Catbird/sounds
The first file, of the catbird song, is not unlike our catbirds, though ours have more robin in them at the moment. For the cat cry, the call recorded in New York is most like ours. I was startled by some of the others, which were less Siamese and more pure meow.
I was going to add a robin's song for comparison, but none of the ones I could find was as melodious and meditative as the ones we have in my neighborhood.
Pamela
no subject
Date: 2020-05-22 10:28 pm (UTC)P.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-22 10:45 pm (UTC)They're hard to see; there could be five across the lawn every night, and I'd still have that exact few seconds to be in the right place to look up. (I am thinking back to tracks in the snow and thinking it might be most nights, if not five foxes.)
no subject
Date: 2020-05-23 04:27 am (UTC)I would probably mistake fox tracks for dog tracks? Maybe not. Mostly we have squirrel, rabbit, and raccoon, as you might expect.
P.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-23 12:53 pm (UTC)All of this is pretty darn vague; my take on the tracks in the winter was some confusion, because they didn't look like cat tracks, but who would be walking their dog from my back yard to my front hard in the middle of the night? They were obviously not right for a coyote; too small. I didn't think of foxes until I actually saw one, and the light bulb came on.