Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Sounds
- Flight call
- Playback
- Playback not used
Media notes
Recorded in a suburban parking lot. The sounds of nearby vehicles and a cable hitting the side of my parabolic dish are also audible. There were also yellow-rumped warblers calling in the background.
Observation details
Identified as red crossbills by voice. Also seen in flight. Audio recordings. I used the recordings to generate audio spectrograms, which show the classic signature of a common flight call type 3 variant as defined by Groth (1993). In particular, the calls start with a rapid drop, then a rapid rise in frequency, followed by another deep drop in frequency, giving each call a "zig-zag" pattern. Many of the calls on the file below also have a kink in the last down-ward slurring part of the vocalization. The initial rapid downward part of the calls is hard to see in the spectrogram below because eBird does not zoom in the spectrogram at sufficiently high time resolution for it to stand out. Type 3 identification has been verfied by Matt Young at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Howard King, Curtis Marantz, and I saw the birds fly out from non-native pines and go east. There were at least six birds in the group. The volume of the flight calls decreases as the birds moved away. The spectrogram below shows that all the calls were type 3. The audio recording below is also available on Xeno-Canto at: http://www.xeno-canto.org/293912
Technical information
- Recorder
- Olympus LS-10S
- Microphone
- Sennheiser ME62
- Accessories
- Telinga 22 inch parabola
- Original file size
- 3.17 MB