Saturday, August 07, 2004

Northern Cardinal Song

While at Kolb Knob in June, I actually recorded two unidentified bird songs. I IDed the Eastern peewee, but couldn't figure out the other one. My brother (David, the only one I got!) helped produce a sound file that was small enough to send to others, Joe Kolb being one. Joe sent it to a couple of naturalist friends who tagged it as a Northern cardinal.
David commented, "I initially suspected the cardinal because it was such a strong whistle. The cardinal is probably the strongest whistler in the U.S., followed by the titmouse. I have National Geographic and Peterson CDs, but this song is not on them. I've read that they sing 28 different songs, so someone out there must have recorded this song somewhere, I just can't find it on the web. Haven't gone through them all though." For those compulsive enough to do so, you can listen to quite a number of recordings on a site David pointed to: JungleWalk.
For completeness sake, see the spectrograph of the cardinal's song above.

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