In the last chapter of my ongoing series of local bird sounds, I covered the Top 10 Backyard Bird Calls, distinguishing these year-round vocalizations from the songs of the spring nesting season. If you missed that post’s explanation of the difference between songs and calls and the various functions that these simpler, less musical vocalizations have, go back to that one. But assuming you have digested all of the prefatory material you need, let’s dive right in with ten more crucial calls if you want to understand what’s going on around you on your next walk in the woods.
- Dark-eyed Junco: Juncos were one of the most important spring singers of the Woodland Songs chapter. They are equally important members of the soundscape during the rest of the year. Their numbers increase in fall with the influx of migratory juncos, and these birds gather into sometimes substantial flocks that like to communicate with a steady patter of basic chip notes. In some ways this is one of the most universal and generic of bird calls, but the junco version is one of the purest and most commonly heard examples of this kind of contact call. You might think of them as high-pitched clicks, ticks, or snaps: one reasonable transliteration is tsipt.
Junco – S. Hunt
- Spotted Towhee (pictured at top): Those junco calls are blank and unemotive, simple and lacking in much personality. Other members of the sparrow family, including the California towhee, make similar calls. But the spotted towhee has a much more distinctive call that is a kind of irritated squeal or annoyed meowing (in some places, “catbird” was an unofficial name for this species). In the very similar eastern towhee, the equivalent call is a little more clearly enunciated into two pitches, giving us the name: tow-wheee. Our spotted towhee oftens tends to slur his call generally upwards for a similar effect: if you want to hear it as tow-wheee, it’s not that hard to do.
- Acorn Woodpecker: This woodpecker is highly unique in its social arrangements, living colonially with numerous birds helping to raise young and guard centralized acorn granaries. This means that they are also our most talkative woodpeckers, with several related calls, most of which are loud, raucous, and distinctive. Sometimes they are one syllable, sometimes a single pair of a longer rising note and then a shorter one, and sometimes they continue in a long, steady series: wak-a-wak-a-wak-a
- Pileated Woodpecker: The largest woodpecker in North America has a consequently large range and a need for consequently large trees for nesting sites. This means that it isn’t encountered as frequently as most of the smaller woodpeckers, especially around Novato and San Rafael where we have few large conifers. Still, they are present in dense, mature woodlands, and your chances of detecting their presence go way up once you have learned to recognize their calls. They often give a loud, not-too-fast series of wuk-wuk-wuk notes, sometimes in flight. It’s kind of like the wak-a-wak-a-wak-a of the acorn woodpecker, but without the alternation between the longer and shorter note.
Bushtit: As with the acorn woodpecker, this is another bird whose social habits make it easy to learn their vocalizations. For the great majority of the year, excepting only a short period of active nesting, bushtits forage in flocks of hyperactive gray ping pong balls, all of which keep up a constant chatter of high-pitched contact calls. One transliteration (that is, a purely phonetic representation, no English language meaning intended) describes this calls as spit. Spit spit spit spit coming from a dozen birds moving frenetically through the foliage clearly indicates a splutter of bushtits. I just invented that collective term, but it seems appropriate.
Nuthatch at feeder - White-breasted Nuthatch: There are three familiar, small, nut-eating birds of the oak woodlands: the titmouse, the chickadee, and the nuthatch. The first two are relatively more adaptable to varied trees and residential areas and so were covered in the Backyard Calls; our local white-breasted nuthatches are more tightly allied to native oaks and are seldom found in neighborhoods that lack such adjacent native habitat. Within that habitat, however, their voice is distinctive: a nasal honking or yank note, usually given singly or at well-spaced intervals. The related red-breasted nuthatch of conifer forests is even more nasal and often gives its call in a more quickly repeated series, but the family resemblance is obvious. Nasal = nuthatch.
Bewick’s Wren – Becky Matsubara Bewick’s Wren: My old friend William Leon Dawson, most enthusiastic of all 20s ornithologists, once said of wrens that “if they could not sing or chatter, or at least scold, they surely would explode.” In addition to being a singer both musical and powerful, wrens also go about their daily business with a pretty steady stream of vigorous buzzy notes. If the nuthatch can be swiftly summed up by a mastery of the adjective “nasal,” the same can be said of the Bewick’s wren and the word “buzz.” In reality, they have a variety of different buzzy calls, which can be distinguished by careful analysis of sonograms, but as far as basic identification goes, once you recognize the buzziness, you are unlikely to go wrong.
Acorn Woodpecker and Steller’s Jay – Christine Hansen - Steller’s Jay: In the backyard chapter, I covered the basic harsh call of the scrub-jay, our common backyard jay. In dense broadleaf woodland or conifer forests, we also have the handsome Steller’s jay, whose voice is similar but distinctive. With practice, you can usually distinguish the simple one-note screeches of the two jays, but it is hard to put into words. The scrub-jay call often rises in pitch, while the Steller’s jay is flatter, but there is also a difference in tone and timbre beyond the easy capacity of words to describe.
Easier to identify is a distinctive quick series of harsh notes that is more unique to the Steller’s Jay. I’ve heard it described both as a chuckle and as a machine gun. It’s somewhere in between the two. This call is pretty quick, maybe 4-10 notes in a second or a little more, countable but fast. Scrub-jays will sometimes repeat notes, but fewer and slower: a typical scrub-jay screech series might have three or four notes, at an easily countable speed.
- Red-shouldered Hawk: This is our loudest hawk, unique in its frequent series of loud, ringing kleer kleer kleer calls. It’s loud and harsh – unmistakably raptorial – and typically repeated many times.
While we’re here, we might as well contrast it with our other common and vocal hawk, the red-tailed hawk. Red-tails are less of woodland birds, though they may well soar overhead just about anywhere in the Bay Area. Their best known call is a single harsh scream. While also unmistakably raptorial, it is easily distinguished from the red-shoulder call, since these screams are long, drawn-out, and single rather than repeated.
- Mourning Dove: In the backyard song chapter, I covered the famous cooing song. The other notable mourning dove sound is a unique whistling of their wings when they take off in flight. Sometimes they take off silently, so it is speculated that they can control this sound and that it functions as an alarm call (other birds will sometimes respond to it as such). This rapid patter is unique to this species and will often alert you to their departing presence. Next time, see if you can spot the dove before it sees you!
Want more bird sounds? Check out the other entries in this series:
- How to Learn Birdsong
- Ten Backyard Bird Songs
- Ten Woodland Bird Songs
- Ten Backyard Calls
- Ten Woodland Calls
- Ten Fall Bird Sounds
Header photo: Spotted towhee by Mick Thompson.
As a very interested novice when it comes to birds (and eager to learn…!) I find your postings extremely interesting, eloquently written, and a pleasure to read. Thank you for sharing your wonderful expertise and keep up the good work…!!
Another excellent piece & most helpful refresher; now Bushtit & spit-spit-spit are melded in my memory. Thank you again, Jack!