Sound: Birdsong

A few years ago, I started listening to birds. Of course, I’ve heard birds all my life, and since I’ve always lived in the Bay Area, I’ve probably heard the same handful of species again and again. But there’s a difference between hearing and listening. The longer I listen, the more there is to hear: not just the sounds of different species, but of individual birds making different sounds at different times and in different situations. If places and times could speak, so much of their audible language would be that of birds.

[Editor’s note: click on the headers to hear the bird calls.]

California Towhee

The California towhee, a beige midsize sedan of a bird, does not have what we would ordinarily call a song. Instead, it emits a loud, periodic beeping that sounds like a smoke detector running low on batteries—a noise my dad refers to as a “chirp bomb.” You’ll hear it from below rather than above, since towhees like to forage through leaf litter, quickly jumping forward and back in search of bugs. My neighborhood in Oakland is full of this mix of dry rustling and beeping.

California towhees aren’t as simple as they seem. While they look to be colored a dull brown all over, closer inspection reveals a bit of orange streaking just below the beak and under the tail, prompting me to nickname them “secret orange-butts.” Their sound repertoire, too, is more complex than chirp bombs: very occasionally, I will hear one or more of them let out an agitated sound, descending in pitch, that I can compare only to someone using a squeaky marker on a whiteboard to draw tighter and tighter squiggles. This signals towhee drama, as far as I can tell, since it coincides with the birds chasing one another through the shrubbery.

Most of the time, though, the beeps are all you hear. Generic as this “song” may seem, it is actually quite geographically specific: the range of California towhees is restricted almost entirely to California and Baja California. And because they are present all year round, the steadiness of their chirps has begun to remind me less of a smoke detector and more of a clock marking local time. 

Mockingbird

Have you ever heard a bird singing loud, complicated songs long into a summer night? If so, it was probably a northern mockingbird. The internet is littered with complaints about this phenomenon: “What can I do about a bird that sings all night long outside my window?” “Rude mockingbird sings loudly all night.” “A mockingbird has been singing loudly for 16 hours a day above my house for 2 months, how do I make him go...