Nature's feathered singers

One of the great delights of my life is singing; I sing in the shower, sing while making nesting boxes, and hum quietly when things are going to hell in a handbasket.

It was during the Great Depression, while living with my grandparents on the farm in Connecticut, that I was introduced to singing - and birds. My uncle Ben was a birder with a fine tenor voice; my grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Rockefeller, was also a tenor of no mean talent. Grandpa was a postman by trade and would often bring homeless people to the farm to live with us until they could get their feet back under them. One night he came home with Henry, an old black man. That was my first introduction to African Americans and the beauty of the human voice.

My mom played the piano, and after supper everyone would gather around the piano and sing hymns and popular tunes she had learned to play, songs like "Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lambzy divey" and "Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit."

But the night my uncle Ben, Grandpa, and Henry sang together, my life changed forever; I can still hear their beautiful harmony. Today, some 70 years later, I often catch myself singing refrains from Henry's snappy, "My Gal, She's a High Born Lady, She's Black, But a-not-too Shady," and smiling at the memories. And every time I hear a male red-winged blackbird belt out his territorial song I return to birding Allspaugh's Pond, just across the pasture fence on that old farm in West Haven, Connecticut.

Mockingbirds preparing to bed down for the night often mimic the sounds they heard during the day - everything from emergency vehicles to orioles and warblers. And for those of you who have been on the high desert at night and heard the sudden song of the male sage thrasher at 3 a.m., you also know there is no other bird that can come close to that one for making you feel good all over.

I recall one night, suffering through a colossal thunderstorm of hail, when a sage thrasher all but saved my life. The storm hit me with cold wind and colder rain and hail as I scrunched in my sleeping bag under a rocky overhang between Wagontire and Lake (now Christmas Valley). Then, at 2 a.m., just about the moment I thought I was to never going stop my teeth from chattering, a male sage thrasher, about three feet away from where I was shivering, was prompted to tell all other thrashers this was his territory. What a song! What a thrill! I stopped shivering and started humming "My Gal..."

Birds make vocal sounds with the syrinx, a bony structure located at the bottom of the tracheae (breathing tube), which is unlike us mammals with a larynx at the top of our tracheae. The bird's syrinx is sometimes connected to an air sack, which resonates sound waves, giving the birds the wide range and quality of their songs and calls.

Great horned owls, especially males when in the mating mood, put forth a selection of "hoots" that can be raspy or melodious, or when in a really bad mood can go from a hoot to a barking sound similar to a dog.

One night, "Mr. Owl," an adult male great horned I lived with for eight years while conducting educational programs with OMSI, got to hooting for a female of his kind in the backyard of my home. Within 10 minutes he had an answer. When I looked out, there she was, perched in a tree not 10 feet from him. To see what would happen, I started hooting when he stopped, expecting the female to get confused between Mr. Owl and myself. I was surprised when suddenly my wife came up behind me and whispered in my ear, "You'd better be careful what you're saying, buster!"

Mimics, such as parrots and crows, can imitate human sounds and even copy human names, sounds that can be both thrilling and frightening. When I was a kid on the farm we had a "pet" crow we called Joe, who knew everyone by name. To get out of a day in school we'd often encourage the crow to follow us to Colonial Park School. Joe would then fly from window to window, pecking and calling our names. We'd all take turns taking the crow back to the farm when the principal had enough of the disturbance.

When Joe was two years old his voice changed, and soon he vanished. Little did we know that not only did his voice change, but sex as well. My uncle Harry found Joe about a week after it vanished, setting on a nest of eggs under an overhang on the barn roof, and shouted down to us, "We have to rename our crow! It's now 'Josephine'; she's setting on three eggs!"

The funniest incident I can recall about Josephine was the night she went to roost in the grape arbor between the back door of the farmhouse and the barn where the outhouse was located (we had no indoor plumbing). My poor old uncle Joe - for whom the crow was named - was making what we called "A visit to the widow," one dark night, slowly making his way along the walkway under the grape arbor, when suddenly someone called his name from above, "Hello Joe!" which brought about an embarrassing situation for uncle Joe, which we boys thought was hilarious.

There is one bird sound that has been terribly overworked: that of the red-tailed hawk. This common buteo (soaring hawk) call has been given credit for the "scream of an eagle" in so many Hollywood productions it makes me groan. In the over 50 years I have been working with both bald and golden eagles, I have never heard either species "scream." Chirp yes, but what we would classify as a "scream," no.

The fellow in the center of the montage (page 23) is a male, yellow-headed blackbird. To say his territorial song is melodious would be stretching a point. There is nothing songlike to anything a yellow-headed belts out to keep other males out of his territory. It's raucous and loud - and it works.

One of the most emotional moments I ever experienced with the call of birds happened at the Deschutes Land Trust's Camp Polk Meadow Preserve a few years back. Due to old age and punishment to my hearing in younger years, I now wear hearing instruments to bring back the sounds of birds and the human voice (which my wife often referred to as "selective hearing").

Central Oregon Audiology in Bend equipped me with instruments that I can switch to a higher frequency to again hear bird sounds. On a birding trip to the preserve, a woman stopped and, cocking her head, asked, "What is that...?"

I listened for a moment and said, "That's a female red-winged blackbird," and suddenly realized (with considerable emotion) that was the first time I had heard that beautiful song in over 10 years...