Southern Accents in Birdworld--Who Knew?

Puff-puff-puff-bzzzzzzz-twitter-gurgle-tweet-la-la-la-----

Lake Junaluska introduced me to the song sparrow.  I suppose I had heard it all my life but had accepted it with the blur of the whole and never isolated its song.  This particular fellow outside my window overlooking the lake was not to be ignored.  He was my alarm clock, my writing background music, the noon whistle, afternoon delight, dinner music, evening serenade, and lullaby.

Likely with a nest nearby, he always repeated the same cadence, tone, and pitch of his rising and falling song.  It was two years ago in May of 2009.  I was on a writing retreat for silence and solitude, working on ch. 8,9,10 (and remember the angst well).  I got to know his song so well I copied it on my flute, and later on the piano, but only barely mentioned it in one my first blogposts.

http://backyardspectator.blogspot.com/2009/05/boiling-cauldron.html

I remember it, because I worked intentionally to understand the song of a song sparrow, and thought I did.  Wrong. When I got home I heard another puff-puff-bzzz-like song, but it had a very different ending pattern from my Lake J guy.  I thought it was a different variety of sparrow, maybe a vesper, but definitely not the song sparrow I knew so well.  I was confident in my self-discovered knowledge, until the visiting Dr. Lisa Zinn, birder extraordinaire, and my lovely future daughter-in-law, confirmed that the bird I heard at home was indeed a song sparrow.

From Lisa I learned that the "introductory notes" are the identifying feature, that song sparrows have different "accents" in different parts of the country, and that it almost doesn't matter what comes at the end.  If it puffs, it's a song sparrow.

Fast forward to Lake Junaluska, Aug, 2011, retreating in same house, now working on ch. 33 (more angst).  Come the puffs and buzzes and bingo!  A very different ending pattern.  Thank you, once again, Dr. Zinn.  Another example of a bit of knowledge being the tip of the iceberg---the enticement only to learn more.  dkm

M.A.P.S. / Checking the Nets / Extracting the Birds

Step two of the bird banding day was to check the nets and extract any captured birds, which we would do every half-hour throughout the morning. It is still darkish in northern Indiana at 6:30, but now the birds are singing like crazy, unlike the quiet of 6:00 when we opened the nets. To my untrained ear it is a random dawn chorus---beautiful but indecipherable. To Dr. Zinn, it is an audible map and promise of which birds might be caught, banded, measured, studied, and released on this day. I am nothing less than astounded at the numbers of individual bird songs she can hear, identify, and imitate, including her fluency of mnemonic codes for each.

I meet the gathered team of five expert bird banders---Dr. Zinn in the middle, three graduate students including my daughter Hannah, and a gentleman volunteer who is a retired biologist from Cornell ornithology laboratories. I notice they are all wearing waterproof boots. Already my wet cold feet tell me why. Promptly at 6:30 the team members clip a few small drawstring bags to their belts, get their net assignments and head out. The bags, made of white cloth, are for carrying the birds, once extracted from the nets, back to the banding table. They prevent trauma, injury, and escape.

I follow Hannah to our assigned nets. My shoes and socks soak up the morning dew as we slog through the long prairie grass. Of our three nets, two are empty, and one holds two small brown birds struggling to get free---a song sparrow and a female indigo bunting. An indigo bunting! Hannah gently cups the first thrashing sparrow in her hand, holding its neck between two fingers so the head is on the outside of her hand, the body in her palm. She carefully lifts each thread of the net from the body, but the feet are so hopelessly entwined as to necessitate calling Dr. Zinn for assistance. The second, the bunting, Hannah extracts easily and drops into a bag. Dr. Zinn arrives from somewhere in the dawn to skillfully rescue the sparrow. We carry them back to the banding table. I imagine myself to be a small sparrow, stunned by whatever I have flown into, frightened by the monster hands, mystified by the whiteness from which I cannot escape, unable to understand that this is a temporary discomfort or that I am making a contribution to scientific research. I might be fighting for my life, but I'm not sure, because so far I'm not hurt and no one is eating me. Who knows? I only know I don't like it.

I, as an amateur observer of the work, am thoroughly energized by the experience---the wonder of the natural world, the thrill of new knowledge gained, the marvel at the organizational efficiency of the bird banding process, the care and respect the researchers exhibit for each tiny specimen they study. More on that part of it tomorrow. dkm

Boiling Cauldron

Like from a boiling culdron, the mist burns off the lake every morning. I would feel cheated of part of a day if I missed it. The mist brings those perfect sentences---the ones that appear on the inside of my forehead when I'm away from the computer---the ones that send me running to my manuscript---that elevate my heartbeat----that are responsible for the ridiculous amount of time I spend honing the imperfect ones.

The mist swirls, billows, and puffs upward, or travels in long straight lines back and forth across the lake like the security queue at the airport, until somehow it wafts away without my knowing. This morning it leaves behind a perfect mirror that reflects the opposite shore in fine enough lines to show single clumps of leaves and the details of a rock wall. Three geese, like six, fly low across the mirror. And all the while the song sparrow sings F-F-f-f-f-f-C#/D-C-C. Again and again. dkm