ML158778381
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Sounds
- Call
- Playback
- Playback used
Observation details
As I was walking along the trail headed towards the chat field at around 11:50 AM, I heard a perfect ALFL rreeBEEa song come from the thick autumn olive area to the right. This immediately got my attention, and I listened closely and heard the rreeBEEa song again. Tim. H. then asked me what I was listening to and when I said ALFL song, he came over and listened. We waited and then heard a third, more distant song. I recorded this song, but it is barely audible. We attempted to locate or hear the bird again from both sides of the autumn olive patch, but it never sang again. Two hours later I returned to the area and entered the thick autumn olive patch, which has several clearings. Not long after, I spotted a Traill's flycatcher perched in the autumn olive. I only saw it a few times for a few seconds as it moved among the thick autumn olive. I played ALFL playback to try and elicit the bird to sing again. The bird never sang, but gave regularly gave Zweeoo types calls from different autumn olives. I spent the next four hours trying to view the bird and hear it sing again, but I was only ever able to track down its general location and record its call before I would hear it call from a new location. I left at 6:30 PM after not hearing the bird call for 30 minutes. While researching identification of ALFL and WIFL calls, I found a resource called applied bioacoustics which has a guide detailing the comparison of their vocal repertoires using spectrograms. I compared the recordings of my zweeoo calls to those of both ALFL and WIFL but I was unable to draw a conclusion based on the spectrograms. I sent my recordings to D. Archibald McCallum, Ph.D. Ornithologist, Bioacoustician, Conservation Biologist. After analyzing the calls, he reported that he thinks the bird is an ALFL. In his response he writes "Nothing about your sample suggests Willow, and several things suggest Alder, albeit with reservations". He later explains that the calls given by this ALFL are aberrant, and offered several possible reasons for this including the incomplete execution of the call from the bird, a female bird giving a call typically given by males or a mixture of a both ALFL zweeoo and weeoo calls. He concludes that his identification of these calls is the "aberrant sounds of a probable Alder Flycatcher". I am confident that the bird was an ALFL given the singing I heard, and the report of the expert analysis. My three best recordings are attached, amplified to a peak amplitude of -3.0 dB.
Technical information
- Recorder
- iPhone 6s
- Microphone
- Edutige EIM-001
- Accessories
- Original file size
- 979.7 KB