How Birds Use Songs & Sounds for Communication

Video Transcript

Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen, and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield. And, we're going to be talking about birding by ear. Birds sing for a variety of reasons. And, it's important for the birder to understand what the birds are saying in addition to understanding how we can use these various vocalizations to help us identify them. There are basically two types of vocalizations that birds routinely utter. One type is the song. And this is the sort of thing that we find in true song birds like Robins, and Thrushes, and Grosbeaks, and Tanagers, and so forth. And, these are rarely complex and oft repeated series of sounds that basically serve the function of establishing a territory for the male before the females arrive in those species that are migratory. And then, ultimately, after having established a pair bound and created a territory, using that song to advertise to other males that the territory is taken. The other types of sounds are variable, usually shorter in nature, and have a variety of functions for the bird. They generally are used to communicate information such as distress, danger, the approach of an adult to a nest. Nestlings have certain vocalizations that they use as begging calls when they are needing to be fed. There are night calls that are used by those migratory species that travel at night and are maintained, used for maintaining contact with one another. So, there's quite a variety of sounds that the birder can listen to and learn because most of these are species specific and are very useful as aids to identification.

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