3 posts tagged “birds”
As I was walking to work, a mourning dove flew across the street from my side to the other and settled, with much flapping, on the roof of a green Cooper Mini.
Being the bird freak that I am, I find this weird, charming, and sad all at once.
I live in an urban neighborhood which is distinguished by having a number of thriving parks. One park serves as the median strip of the neighborhood’s central thoroughfare for two blocks. Two blocks west, another large two-way street has an even wider median park that extends for more than six blocks. One small park that boasts hollyhocks every summer is named for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once lived in this area. And behind my home is a small park that serves as a buffer between our row of houses and the noise, traffic, and crime of a major east-west thoroughfare.
This park, which is roughly triangular, is bordered by small boulders and centered on an octagonal walkway that encloses a path of flowers--daffodils and tulips have made their scheduled appearances there. There are two large silver maples, one partly cloaked with ivy, and a number of other trees, and the rock border is augmented by a hedge along two sides. Between the hedges and the trees, it supports a large bird population. Every morning, when I make my first-thing waking-up trip to the bathroom, I'm amazed at how many different birdcalls I hear. When we moved in last July, I was certainly aware of the presence of birds out back, but July is not spring. Every morning there's a fugue of voices celebrating life! sex! spring! babies! life! It's not so much like a chorus as like the seemingly competing yet harmonious chaos of "Fugue for Tinhorns", the opening song of Guys and Dolls.
The cardinal is one distinctive voice. He has several calls I know, some of them shared by his mate. The most common is his cheery "beekerbeekerbee!" Sometimes it's closer to "wheekerwheekerwhee!" or "kerBEEkerBEEker!" He likes to repeat this for a while; it 's casual, cheerful, a way of letting the world know hes there. He has another call, louder and more piercing, an intense "tseer, tseer." The vowel sound has a distinct crescendo/decrescendo, swell and decline. Then there's the conversational "tsip! tsip!" which he shares with his mate. They toss it back and forth, question and answer, call and response: "Tsip?" "Tsip!"
Once in a while I hear my beloved mourning doves. They have a very distinctive call, a low-pitched, appropriately mournful coo which Roger Tory Peterson renders as "Coah, coo coo coo". The "ah" is louder and higher in pitch than the rest of the call. If I look out the bathroom window when I hear this, I often see the dove sitting on one of the telephone or power wires which cross over the backyards below; we're on the third floor, so I can actually look down on these wires, which are a favored perch for a lot of birds.
There are house finches all over the neighborhood, and there are plenty of them behind our house, too. This morning, as I started out for work, I saw one in the grass of the median park. I'm not sure I've even seen one on the ground; I could clearly see it was a male, his little head a purply-red as if he'd been dipped in raspberry juice. They have a rapid, twittering call I can't translate into human phonemes, but it reminds me of the songs of my exotic finches, whose ancestors were from India--a little piccolo descant.
Then there's the sparrow that I call "the nine-eight bird". I think it is the white-throated sparrow, which is a true sparrow and native to this region. (The very common House Sparrow is actually a weaver finch and was originally introduced from England.) This little sparrow has a call with nine beats, like an Irish slip jig: "Da da da, deedeedee deedeedee deedeedee." The second "da" is on a higher pitch than the rest. I can whistle it, badly.
Finally, there's the mockingbird. The mockingbird is the annoying tenor who not only gets all the solos, he knows everybody else's part as well as he knows his own (and sometimes better). I've heard mockers imitate cardinals, bluejays, seagulls, robins, starlings, you name it. The one call that I think of as specifically his own is, well, a mocking little noise that sounds something like "nyah nyaaah nyah". The first "nyah" is higher-pitched, but the middle one is stressed. He says that two or three times before moving on, whereas he typically repeats his imitations in rounds of half a dozen.
I do live in an exceptionally well-greened area. I just wish the whole city, all cities, were as lush with trees, flowers, and birds as my little neighborhood. It can be done.
