 Good evening everyone. My name is Bill Graben with York County Audubon and on behalf of our board of directors delighted to have you with us here tonight for our May program. Quite a month it is. Birds and warblers are pouring in so a great time for this program. First a word about our program for next month. Next month we will be presenting a special musical event entitled Bird Songs. Monica Graben who has been a performer and singer for many many years. A number of years ago did a program for us entitled Bird Songs and not referring to the types of bird songs that Doug's going to be talking about tonight but rather bird songs taking typically traditional folk songs and popular tunes and re-lyricizing them adding new lyrics to make them songs about birding or more relevant to today's birding and birders and that show Shelby years back was tremendously well received and we're delightful we're delighted to next month have a an updated version of that at our it'll be on Tuesday June 21st and I will note that one of the people who was most taken and in love with that program that Monica did was Pat Moynihan who was our longtime member of our board of directors and a wonderful birder and wonderful person and she passed away this past December so this program that will be coming up next month will be of course for your entertainment and enjoyment but it will also be in part a in memory in Pat's memory and in honor of Pat as we miss her very much and one technical note on that program while audio is not typically a concern when you're watching a zoom in which a speaker is speaking it may be more of a concern or more of a desire desire for quality audio when you're watching a musical performance so we encourage you to try that with headphones or external speakers if you can you'll certainly be able to hear it without those but if you can do that it will add to the quality of the experience and one quick traditional note for tonight that's more we say it almost every month but it's more critical this month probably than any other that is please keep cats indoors cats kill millions of birds your cats if you have neighbors or friends with cats please encourage them especially when birds are migrating in are exhausted are then engaging in mating and nesting enough said they're particularly vulnerable but on to tonight we are delighted to have with us mr. can I call you mr. mr. Doug Hitchcox Doug is a longtime member of the York County Audubon Board of Directors he's also the staff naturalist at Maine Audubon for many a year he's known to birders throughout the state he's he and beyond he's active in all things bird related in the state of Maine and we're thrilled to have him here tonight for this program entitled what's that bird I hear which is a question that many of us ask ourselves many times a day especially at this time of year so Doug's going to give us some tips and suggestions for how to better answer that question with a greater regularity than we otherwise might so we will have a Q&A at the end so if you have any questions please type them into the chat at any time and we'll get you some answers at the end of the program but with that and without further ado here's Doug thank you I'm going to jump right in I have a lot to cover let's see share there will be audio make sure that you can hear that as best you can and I'm just gonna make sure I have my chat window open because I'm gonna have a little quiz for you guys in a few minutes we'll get there but I'm gonna quiz you on some songs but we'll get there has said so yeah tonight's program is this what's that bird I'm hearing as we're calling it but it's kind of a version of for a series I do at Maine Audubon that we call our birding basic series this one is also goes by the alternative title birding by ear so I guess I'll show you an outline in a second but I'm almost contractually obligated to start with this one certainly since you found this program I assume that you're well aware with Maine Audubon York County obviously being a chapter of Maine Audubon but I just want to make the plug that we're doing a ton of work I'll mention some bird walks some other programs and things that we're doing right now we're trying to do a lot more of it for free to be as accessible as possible especially virtually where we can have you know hundreds of people attending programs from large geographic areas but the only way we can do that work because we are a member-based organization is either by you becoming a member or donating so keep that in mind there's a lot of great work that Maine Audubon's doing through our education department where I work our conservation department as you can see here like middle of the screen Laura Zitzky out on beaches I know especially York County hosts the majority of Maine's sandy beaches and thus all very nesting piping clovers or all of them that nest on those beaches and then we've got our third leg we stand on the action or advocacy so got a lot of work going on right now and we need your support to keep doing it just to get on your radar in case you're not aware these are mostly all listed on Maine Audubon's website the Fort Williams Walk might not be yet but I'm leaving a ton of bird walks this time of year I'll be at Evergreen Cemetery tomorrow Thursday and Friday Evergreen Cemetery in Portland it's a wonderful migrant trap haven't been there the last couple days as intended but a huge thanks to some of my colleagues Nick London and Linda Woodard who filled in for me but I'll be back tomorrow Thursday and Friday as well next Monday we're at Fort Williams we do that walk every year and it's absolutely wonderful place to see birds often coming right in off the ocean as they're migrating in the morning and then River Point Conservation Area Biodiversity Research Institute is doing bird banding there so you can join us and actually get to see those birds in the hand which is really cool they have misnets set up we'll get all into that and these are all at 7am I see folks in the chat it's a nice thing every single morning we start at 7am again you should all be up on mainautobahn.org if you want to find more information links on where to go and everything every Thursday I do a bird walk at Gilson Farm main autobahn headquarters in Falmouth except this Thursday be at Evergreen and then I just want to make a plug we've got a evening puff and cruise at a new harbor on May 31st not for free we do need to pay for the boat but that's a bit earlier than we tend to do them in the year and it'll also be a little earlier in the evening so there's still plenty of space on that trip it's a it's going to be a fun one for sure so what I want to cover tonight I've really changed this talk every year certainly every time I do this presentation it makes no sense for me to just sit here and you know say play a house barrow song and say this is what it sounds like and you'll learn birdsong with with repetition that is certainly one of the best ways to do it but what I always try to do in in these programs or like any of my birding basics ones is is try to teach more the things that I think are like harder to pick up from either like a book or a CD or or something else so we're going to cover things like very basic biology I like to quickly admit like as a finance major in school I did in biology and it was very funny to fail the first quiz because I knew birds biology but I didn't know understand mammals that well and so the questions were was about the circulatory system comparing birds to mammals and I could explain the birds but who knows what's happening in mammals so we'll briefly touch on it talk about why birds sing and then get into this idea of like what is the difference between a song a call there's lots of vocalizations that that birds can make and then as we're going through we'll talk about things like dialects how birds learn their songs I usually say that we'll wrap up with common examples but I doubt we'll get there what I want to wrap up with are some resources I'm sure folks are probably aware of some of the cool apps that are out there Merlin being an absolutely amazing tool it has its shortcomings and we can talk about some of those when we get there I'll wrap up with some of those books and CDs those apps the things that can then be essentially your homework assignments to go from here so I do like to point out you know there's this wonderful hobby that we all do called bird watching but since we're going to be talking about birding by ear so much this is where I think you're kind of taking your skill from the idea of like bird watching which to me is like you looking out your backyard window maybe at your bird feeder and just watching the birds that are there to me the hobby that the sport if you will birding is when you're actually going out pursuing birds trying to find them out in the field and that's birding to me so no longer are we bird watching I do like to point out we've got these birders over here birding then you've got this has photos from Cornell who's there and I apologize so I hope you can hear me fine I'll keep going and we'll cross our fingers for the best this was an audio recording workshop I did through the Macaulay library at the Cornell lab and so here was this tour these people that were going around touring the campus they were spotting there was a clay colored sparrow sitting up in the tree that we were trying to record so here were the birders here were the bird watchers and then I loved this guy in the background the birder watcher who is watching the birders pretty entertaining so let's talk about the biology for a second the the the organ that birds use to produce their vocalizations that is the songs and calls is very different not only in its structure but also its kind of location in the body from from our own I always laugh at diagrams like this because you know we've got this larynx sitting in our throat but we certainly don't tend to think of it looking like this the the important takeaway here here's the trachea you can think of this you know our windpipe the larynx is sitting at the top of the trachea contains these hard membranes those are our vocal cords and we get this vibration as air passes excuse me the only thing I want you to know is there's you know this wonderful system of complex muscles and cartilage that are essentially creating this little bit of control that we have as air is essentially vibrating through the much cooler avian syrinx notice now we're going all the way down to the bottom of the trachea so this syrinx for birds is actually sitting really low down in the chest surrounded by air sac air sacs kind of deeper into the breast cavity um what's so kind of neat about these is that where we have this split going on the way I've heard this explain that the tension that's on these membranes you can think of it as like the skin on a drum being able to adjust that so you can make different noises on a drum by pulling that skin tighter or loosening up on it a little bit and so that's how birds are able to control both the intensity kind of the loudness and the frequency which is their pitch by altering the air pressure passing from the lungs to the syrinx by varying that tension and doing it in both sides of these so they have not only twice uh uh what's the way to say that um I'll call it twice the complexity but it's it's even more than that and rather than looking at these silly diagrams let's look at an actual bird's vocalization here so this is going to be for northern cardinal and I'll show you a few spectrograms uh throughout the evening spectrograms are showing us frequency measured here in uh kilohertz I guess um hurts over time so some of these I've created little videos out of it'll be easier to see those in a minute but what we're getting to see are these upslurred notes and then some downslurred notes and let's listen to this bird now any easy to follow that bird along what's fun to hear again remember how they can control kind of the left and right side of that syrinx they can make different noises out of either side and using this diagram if we were to draw color this in as this kind of blue section we could imagine the blue being like the left side and then the red being the right side that's how they can start adding complexity to their songs without needing like this kind of extra effort to change pitch like we could all whistle like this you know it's very easy like but like I'm literally having to change like the shape of my tongue my lips these birds are able to control all of that right in their chest thanks to that amazing organ that they have worth noting that like that's where the song the sound is really coming from if you ever see a bird sing obviously they don't have the lips they're just opening their beak but really very little tongue control too so that's kind of a really straightforward example let's look at a much more complex song the hermit thrush we'll talk more I guess about some other thrushes but thrushes send out these very complex often described as like otherworldly vocalizations that they can make and it's not only because they're just singing with like the left or right side they're singing with the left and right at the same time which is really tricky um let's listen to this bird hermit thrush excuse me hermit thrush always has a single introductory note before going into this flute like again otherworldly sounding noise um let's listen to it and now why that you can imagine that's going to be really hard to imitate and it's because we physically can't with our one larynx one windpipe if you will but you know what I mean physically cannot imitate this noise uh the closest thing I think humans are really capable of if you ever hear um uh what are they called throat singers I think is the sorry if I've got that that name wrong but um you you can you can almost do a little imitation if you try to hum while you whistle uh I won't do it right now especially with the dry throat I've got going but here's a fun test for you later try to hum while you whistle not my best here's Beery this is another type of thrush um and let's look at their song on a spectrogram as well this one should play along with it which is a little easier to keep track of a little lag with the audio but uh what's fun to see it's a little hard to see on just the coloring of the spectrogram but this bird is again using both the left and right sides and essentially singing with itself and that's what gives it that um almost echoey part of the of the song uh what's really fun to do let me play this one more time at normal speed now let's play it back at half speed half of real time um and I should note the software I used to do that splits it into a two channel thing so I didn't catch this when I was doing it but that's why we'll now see there's two but they should be identical so let's listen to this at half speed and really listen for how there's this echoey nature to the song and that's literally opposite sides of that sea rink uh singing just slightly off but with itself I love that you can really like hear again the kind of two parts I'll play one more time just for kicks uh just to look at a few other birds real quick um I I really like having spectrograms I'm a visual learner I do not have a good musical ear so for me to just hear birds sing and be told like oh here's the mnemonic for that like um it sticks eventually but when I can have a visualization it really kind of helps me kind of break down the parts of the song so I'll do that for a few here um chestnut sided warbler uh as we were saying earlier another one of these species that has really arrived this week um quite a few of them showed up yesterday uh let's listen to the song common mnemonic is please please please excuse me please please please to meet you play it one more time and now let's listen to this at half speed I like doing this because again I think it helps you kind of break down the songs and realize some of the complexity that's going on here when you you know first hear a lot of the different types of warblers um a lot of them sound very similar but when you start getting into um truly the the structure of some of these songs it can really help and here's one more complex one Song Sparrow one of our most abundant songsters all over the state uh pretty much anywhere you're going to go over the next few months you're likely to hear Song Sparrow singing a good mnemonic for this is maids maids maids burn your tea kettle little little so a few nice you know introductory notes there I apologize for the coughing and dry throat on day five of a COVID diagnosis so killing great um we've got a few introductory notes that's kind of the the key thing to to listen for um then there's these wonderful trills kind of the middle and towards the end by this one more time and now let's listen to it just because this is so fun to do slow down for us now there's a lot going on here the complexity of some of these notes we even get harmonics that are are rising up um for the sake of tonight's program uh I'm not going to go into that too much I'll quickly mention I'll hold this up again towards the end I assume sorry I never quite know how webinar works if you if you all can see me I hope you can uh the Peterson Field Guide to Field Guide to Sounds of Eastern North America by Nathan Pipelo sorry I think I always say his name wrong has a wonderful breakdown of essentially how to read spectrograms um a lot of it's available online too so Nathan's got this kind of wonderful resource especially if you are really into spectrograms um and I apologize if uh if folks are having trouble with that audio let's see how it uh keeps working throughout so why do birds sing and we need to be very clear about what the definition of uh song is and a song is any noise that a bird is uh is creating that is used to either attract a mate or defend a territory and so why I'm kind of emphasizing it's it's those two things what they're doing is either attracting a mate or defending a territory and then it's any noise that's created to do that so that can be a vocalization what we all probably think of when we think of a bird song um but it's fun to know that there are a number of other things that birds do they can be mechanical noises that are also considered bird song so this time of year very easy to hear woodpeckers drumming and truly like drumming like not good at tapping on my desk I guess but um when you hear that loud like hollowed out tree with that rapid drum not just pecking away at the wood as you know they would be looking for food but um that really loud drumming drumming again it's a it's a mechanical noise it's from the woodpecker scammering its beak against a generally hollow substrate um that is considered that bird song uh another fun one is um roughed grouse this time of year are drumming uh where they're essentially clapping their wings against their body in that deep very low drumming or booming noise again not a vocalization at all but that is still considered their song um so that's your your I guess fun fact of the night maybe that um we define a song by its purpose to uh attract made or depend territory some singing might be done for a bit of communication I'll talk about uh females singing in just a little bit um excuse me but then I would say important to know that just about any other noise uh that we hear birds making otherwise it's it's essentially considered call um that's going to be kind of a good way for you to to separate things from we'll hear birders talk about songs and calls and that generally is kind of our two categories um chips uh chip notes are arguably call notes but uh I think a key thing before maybe we move on from this is just um you know if that purpose is to attract made or defend a territory I always think of it like this magnolia warbler here singing its heart out when you hear birds singing first sing in the morning it's as if they're like stepping out on their front doors you know front door of their their territory and just yelling at their neighbors um you stay over there I'll stay over here like that's your territory you know birds are typically trying to not be very um confrontational you rarely rarely see birds uh in physical fights there's certainly some some aggressive ones out there hummingbirds are super aggressive um excuse me but um that tends to be kind of the the reason why the the key thing females are also listening to these songs these complex songs that birds are putting together to um to attract those mates and they can usually hear it in a much better or finer detail than we can so that's another reason why I like to play those songs back to slow down is that's probably like how well the female bird can hear that song and she's going to start picking through like you know we could imagine sorry if I can go back for a second if we take our song sparrow here you know looks like a great song but like notice a little bit of a bigger gap between like these first two notes than here and here like if you're a picky female song sparrow who excuse me only wants the best mate you know maybe that's just not cutting it he's a little too short for you or whatever the embarrassing might be but um they can uh uh they're listening to these these songs on much higher quality um a higher definition if you well then then we can so I started mentioning calls these are typically just used for communication um uh you'll often hear calls used when predators are around so a nice thing about calls versus songs is that they tend to be very short and very high pitched so songs can be longer they can be complex sometimes lower pitch because um you're trying to convey a lot of information um and and maybe not uh super far where a call if there's a predator if there's a hawk that comes by you want to give a short high pitch call because uh being high pitched it's not going to travel very far but it's really hard to pinpoint if you ever hear you know a really high pitch noise especially bird excuse me it can be often really hard to pick out exactly where in a tree they are because it's just it's again hard to pinpoint high frequency noises low frequency like that drumming uh grouse you can turn right to where they're coming from you know in the woods and that'll travel really far distances so calls are wonderful to to not give yourself away we know they're also used as uh air traffic control essentially so um excuse me there's hundreds of thousands of birds that are migrating overhead each night right now sometimes we're getting millions of birds passing over and it's really fun to go out so sorry and it's fun to go out at night usually about an hour after sunset it'll continue um sometimes up until midnight uh birds are often going to be flying even later than that but they're going to be so high up they can be harder to detect but you'll hear them giving these call notes and let me try playing a few for you right now so that little there's a warbler there's a sparrow a little higher and thinner a little background noise here but you get that loud the rose-breasted bro speed is a great call to learn bro speaks calls sometimes a lot more than they sing and so what's really fun is uh people have put together what they call the rosetta stone uh to warblers and so a little hard to see on especially if you're on a small screen but each one of these is showing the the the image that would show up on a spectrogram if you were to record these warblers as they're calling at night here's 48 species of our North American wood warblers and all the different noises they make so there's there's research that's now being done uh this will be successful I think to almost anyone in your your backyard probably in the next couple of years where you can just essentially leave a microphone pointed up to the sky overnight record what passes and essentially get a read out of uh what birds and and with what frequency they were detected each night so pretty amazing stuff it's Louisiana water thrush one of our warblers uh I wanted this to be a segue into uh just discuss like um how do birds learn their songs we know a lot of them do I guess that's the the spoiler vocal learning is a very kind of rare thing um amongst animals especially rare in in mammals um so far it's only been demonstrated in one uh primate humans we're doing a good job at it cetaceans like whales and dolphins uh have vocal learning uh there's two species of bats and that's about it for mammals which is like not very many which is amazing when you contrast it to birds there's 10 000 species of birds in the world excuse me of those 10 000 almost 5 000 of them are uh uh exhibit vocal learning they learn their songs and calls um that's going to be this group we'll talk about the osseine passerines or osseine songbirds um that also includes our our parrots which there's about 350 species of and then hummingbirds also have learned songs hummingbirds around the world have or excuse me it's just a new world species but outside of Maine I should say um can have some really complex uh quite amazing songs that uh that they give we typically don't get to enjoy it as much with our ruby-throated hummingbird here but uh but cool enough so let's break down how do birds learn their songs um as juveniles typically and we'll kind of generalize for a second here and then talk about some of the birds in these different categories typically they're learning when they're young uh much in the same way that humans have this kind of uh this learning period for birds it occurs in two stages the sensory learning which is basically when you are a juvenile bird uh typically still sitting in a nest so as a little baby bird you're sitting in a nest and you're going to be listening to kind of the environment around you guess who's going to be probably the most uh abundant or loudest singing bird nearby most likely going to be your father so or hopefully some some other similar um of the same species I should say so you're going to you know have this example that you're going to listen to and you're going to be memorizing the spectral so that's a frequency in a temporal in time spectral temporal qualities of the song and that gives you this template uh literally just called a song template that birds are going to essentially now keep with them for the rest of their lives so that's happening if we just look at like our this top diagram here um after hatching you're having this sensory period when you're you know sitting in the nest listening to your father and this is where things like dialects start coming in so if you're listening to your father or some of the neighboring birds you might notice um the twang in their voice or that southern drawl that they have and that's where this bird is going to learn that as well excuse me um and it's essentially going to be added to their song template and now they've got that template excuse me they're hopefully going to survive the fall and the winter some birds you'll actually start hearing them singing even later in the fall uh there's some sparrows that are really good examples of this like white throated sparrows will hear singing in the fall but especially going into the spring this is where they're in the second period that we call the sensory motor period and this is when they're going to start producing their own vocalizations and practicing and they're basically trying to make their voice match that song template that they've learned so learning it here in that sensory period now they're singing themselves trying to match it hopefully by spring when they're attracting a mate and then that song becomes what we call crystallized back here plastic is the term a plastic song that's going to change a lot once they've hit it they've matched that template they say this is how my song should sound um that is going to be crystallized in their memory and they can now sing that song uh essentially for the rest of their lives sorry i think i actually have another yeah i like this diagram a little better um plus it's got nice pictures of birds on it um excuse me so just uh a couple birds to look at real quick things like our zebra finches are one of the most studied songbirds out there um which have this uh a very short period where they're essentially crystallizing that one song that they'll have um white crowned or here in Maine think of white throated sparrows having this kind of awesome uh uh thing that they do so having that sensory period we talked about practicing that subsong again as we call it the plastic song going throughout the uh winter now they're going to sound great uh but each year they have to essentially keep learning that song and so what you'll hear uh white throated sparrow has the mnemonic that a lot of people use is like old sam peabody peabody peabody so you get these introductory notes it's like sorry can't whistle too well right now but and so like that would be a nice crystallized song for for one of these birds but what you'll hear especially in the fall when they have this plastic song is you'll hear and then they just stop and it's again them like referring to that template testing it out trying to figure it out again um until they they crystallize it and it's worth noting there is this other group what we call the the open ended learners um that's funny I thought let's just look back here this is actually the right way to look at it they have multiple sensory periods um so they're learning throughout one part of the year then excuse me singing and practicing themselves then they'll pick up more songs so these are things like uh this is a canary in the photo here but for folks who know the different mimics so things like a mockingbird the gray cappered brown thrasher birds that are imitating other noises that they hear they're going to keep adding to their repertoire uh each year during that sensory period that they keep having here's a fun one here's a one of our open ended learners this is a european starling uh this video um I took it off of youtube jay lumi I guess was this guy's name who uploaded this uh kind of amazing video of his um it's a pet european starling as a non-native species uh it can be kept as pets in the u.s um and his starling has heard him talking so much that it's actually started to learn some of the things that he says so let me click play here's a station stop it for a second it's a little hard to hear he's saying hey alexa play violin music here's a station alexa play violin music here's a station here's a station alexa stop alexa stop so there's definitely something comical to it that like the bird has learned it saying alexa stop probably the most common thing you say to your little listening devices what's also fun in that video is you can see how much like it doesn't need to open its feet to make those vocalizations but you can see those feathers uh down in the throat that are are moving so much just absolutely fascinating there's so many cool not quite endless but there's plenty of videos of of starlings imitating either people all sorts of things that they hear which is pretty interesting it's worth also mentioning so we've talked about these open-ended learners these birds that are that have vocal learning but as i as we said kind of at the beginning that's only about half of all the birds out there especially the paw sign passerines but there's a number of these other birds like pb here um especially flycatchers i think are one of the best examples of it because they're still a very vocal bird they have these amazing songs but they are innate learners they are born knowing they're one song um that's what they're going to sound like and from a birders perspective that's actually one of like the best things for us because there's they're not going to be that confusing at all every single eastern pb you hear is probably going to sound like every other eastern pb you hear same thing pretty much all our flycatchers uh just worth noting you know said it a couple times but female birds do have a quite interesting uh repertoire of songs um you don't have to go too far back in literature to find where a lot of people said like females don't sing and it's just the males that are defending their territories but uh there's a number of of of those birds out there it's actually 71 of all the of all these passerines that at least have some female song present so it's a lot more abundant than than we really thought uh i've used this word a couple times you see it a lot only when you're reading about bird vocalizations i feel like otherwise uh you never quite hear the breakup of our our passerines passerines are songbirds and there's these the oscine passerines and the sub oscine passerines and one of the things that really kind of separates them is how complex uh their syrinx is and what i wanted to show kind of in this slide is let's take a virginia rail this is not a passerine at all it's not a songbird it's a braille and arguably a kind of older lineage if you will um they do have an amazing vocalization but i'll play it in a second and you'll hear it's not super complex kind of one one note except for that last one that's like really a bird let's go into a sub oscine passerine so a songbird you know should have this really elaborate song right kingbirds they do have a slightly more complex song that they'll do excuse me but this is generally what they are going to sound like now once we step into this uh they actually evolved later that's kind of the key thing with these oscine passerines that have these really complex songs it's because they're built for it so let's listen to white iberia clearly a complex uh oh and this is a fun one sorry it's a it's a bad video this is me holding my phone through my spotting scope just to show here's a female northern cardinal it's really hard to hear but you can even see it in the video the male singing back there's a male and female meaning so it's a fun one to look for when you can have sexually dimorphic herds that's where the males and females look different um and especially with cardinals now this is a really fun time of the year have you hear a cardinal singing track it down and see is it a female that's singing um for the sake of time i'll kind of skip this story i can't believe we're closing in on it already um what i just wanted to show this was uh a female excuse me american red start that we found um that was singing and what's neat is that with each one of the her songs it's the most it's a kind of loudest or or or or um showing up the best on the on the specter ends here is uh it's very plastic notice how every time she sang it looks a little different some of these are kind of similar but every time she's saying it was it was a little bit different um the male that was in the territory you can see his part of the spectrogram here um every time he's saying it was spot on it sounded exactly the same as this crystallized song and what was cool watching this nest was the female would sing a little bit maybe wait a minute sing again and then as time went on she would start singing faster and faster to almost just like constant song and then the male would come zipping in with a mouthful of food and the female would occasionally feed and after the male left the female would have this kind of slow song again singing every minute or so and then same thing like we we watched this happen over the course of half an hour where her song intensity would pick up just as it was getting kind of at its loudest or most frequent the male would come zipping in with food and off you go um so clearly there's some sort of communication that was going on there with this female bird song so the only takeaway is that like we're we're we're still kind of looking at the tip of the iceberg I think as we're trying to learn what is the purpose of female song so let's do um some of the fun part of learning bird song um we're clearly going to go over eight o'clock I apologize if folks are uh looking for that hard stop at eight but let's do this as quickly as we can here's some of my tips for learning bird song and why I think it's so important one of the rarest birds I've seen in North America this was the stunning view that I got of it there it is you can kind of see this nice rounded head there's the belly there's a Key West quelled up um despite the name they're not in Key West um they're probably all hunted out of there but we only were able to find this bird because of some of the noises that it was making there's other birds right in our backyards here this is Kennebunk Plains so they'll list time of year and you'll find things like Eastern Whipper Wills uh Whipper Wills are uh I think I've seen one once otherwise uh you really only hear them and there's a Chepwills Woodow that's up in Orland plain and that's I think four years now there's also some birds that you just visibly can't identify we were talking about fly catchers earlier this is one of the another one of those with an innate song uh and the the group of fly catchers at birders kind of hate the Impidenax fly catchers they all look very similar and many of them uh or I should say there's a few of them but you really cannot identify unless you hear the bird vocalize so all their fly catcher and willow fly catcher we have one of each in either hand side by side and unless one made a noise we could not tell you which one is which so real quick I'm going to play the free beer free beer now the willow fly catcher it's huge you get a different emphasis in the song kind of at different times but um uh we mentioned Pat Moynihan earlier this was a hummingbird that showed up at her house back in 2012 um and we actually identified it first uh just using a a recording of uh it's it's vocalization which was really cool uh a fun thing I just wanted to mention I found this email 2008 the first Christmas bird count I helped out with Lita Beth the compiler sent out this email and asked for uh birders that were able to identify uh golden crown kinglets and brown creepers by year I'm sorry we seem to have lost Doug I think we're still live on the zoom and I'm speaking to you if you want to continue through my phone yeah Doug saying please bear with him for a moment he's trying to figure out why his video froze yeah Doug Doug's trying to re-engage his internet well do you want to should we leave it at that I think I think we'll need to uh wrap up this program we did get almost all the way through it we can post a uh an epilogue to it if that might be helpful so I'd say so Doug extends his apologies to everyone and we will do he will record a little epilogue to uh complete the program and we'll post that on our website along with the recording of the program that we did get through uh so thank you all very much for joining us this evening uh please take a keep an eye out for that on our website uh or youtube page and uh we hope to see you next month and uh Doug thanks very much for doing your best to get through the program tonight and we have you have our best wishes for completing your recovery and uh go easy on your voice for a few more days is uh I think our uh recommendation okay no no problem whatsoever so thank you everyone and good night