“Shapes of alarm” are the building blocks of bird language. Each animal creates its own unique signature of response from the birds.
Exploring Bird Language – Stories from the Field by Geoffrey McMullan Someone Is Coming The San Bushmen call the Woodpecker (my favorite bird), Zana. They told me that when Zana calls it is telling them that someone will soon visit and indeed each time this happened they would call out “Sau” (the name they gave […]
by Dan Gardoqui During an early May morning in Maine, I was on a monthly conference call with some colleagues, occasionally multi-tasking on a few other projects, when I noticed that two robins outside my window (which was closed at the time) stopped moving. I’m not talking a brief pause- instead, they were frozen […]
by Rick Bedsworth At the south of my sit spot, there is a picnic area and a dumpster, which has become a larder of sorts for certain animals. Picnicking increases during the summer time, and the appearance of extra food scraps synchronizes perfectly with the rearing of young mammals that use this dumpster larder […]
by Josh Lane In a recent Wall Street Journal review of Jon Young’s book, What the Robin Knows, reviewer Jonathan Rosen touched on an interesting question: How can one really learn to distinguish between the approach of a cat or a dog simply through reading the language of the birds? Is this kind of skill possible to […]