ML613318170
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Playback
- Not specified
Observation details
Continuing in floodplain willow thicket between the riprap and pines and the channel outflow to the north. The bird was calling in sporadic bursts. After several minutes of standing on the riprap and listening to it calling from deep in the thicket, I pished and it flew from deep in the thicket to within 4-5’ of me in the rocks and poked around there and under logs for a while before returning to the thickets. It was a tiny brown wren with a short tail. It had an orange-ish cast to the upper parts, a distinctly paler throat and a pale supercilium. There were tiny white spots on the coverts. Alone, this wouldn’t have me convinced of its Winter Wren-ness, as I’ve seen too many photos that look like Winter with recordings that sound like Pacific (and vice versa)… however, this bird called quite a bit: single, double, and triple “jimp” sounds, Song Sparrow-like and not at all like the calls of Pacific. Having just listened to Winter Wrens a few days ago in New Jersey, I got the impression that some of this bird’s calls were wheezier or breathier (some of the single "jimp"s), while most were inseparable from calls of solid wintering east coast birds. I took some cell phone recordings and posted them here. Spectrograms are consistent with other Winter Wren calls showing distinct harmonics with amplitude concentrated in the lower frequencies of the call, at and below 4kHz, rather than the smeared spectrograms of Pacific Wren (with amplitude concentrated at ~6kHz). Long story short, I'm confident in the identification.
Technical information
- Recorder
- Microphone
- Accessories
- Original file size
- 321.42 KB