Sometimes us birdwatchers (or birders as we generally prefer to be called) can be so keen to cover a large area during a walk, in the hope of making a long list of birds seen, that we risk missing something remarkable being done by a common bird. At the end of a walk we might have seen or heard a record number of birds but not learned anything new about any of them. I think I am often guilty of this.
Today however, I went out deliberately looking for a bird that I could photograph and in the process saw, and heard, something that I have never seen before. It was a pair of today’s spotlight species - the Common Linnet (Linaria cannabina) apparently singing together, from a series of perches in a small area, for at least ten minutes (they were there when I arrived and I left before they did so it may actually have been much longer). They would alight next to each other on a twig or lamp-post, sing a few seconds of a twittery, squeaky song, then move to another perch, do it again, and then fly round in a circle, perhaps 20 or 30 metres in diameter, calling all the time in flight, before returning to the first place (or somewhere very close to it) and starting the process again. When I say 'a pair' and 'singing' some people's eyebrows might already be heading skywards (I'll explain below why that might be), but I will say that there were two birds, one clearly an adult male Linnet, with his rich brown back, grey head, red forehead patch and red chest, and the other a streaky brown bird which could have been either an adult female or a young bird of either sex. I call them a pair because they were sticking very close together and both appeared to be making sounds that I would call a song (as distinct from a call - see below for more on this distinction). If a real bird-vocalisation expert (that definitely isn't me) listens to the recording I made and says 'no, that's a call, not a song', then I will hold my hands up and admit I was wrong. The time of year also seems a bit unusual for birds to be singing, as they will mostly have finished breeding by now and singing tends to be heard more during the breeding season.
As well as the photos below, I was able to capture a bit of film on my phone- Linnets singing in North Ormesby - the birds are really only dots in the film but the song can be heard fairly clearly, over the noise of the wind and occasional cars, although you may have to turn the sound up on your device to hear it well. As you will see from the street-lamps on the video, and the red traffic light in the background on the photos, I didn't have to go to some remote place in the country to see these beautiful birds - I just walked a few minutes from my house in urban Middlesbrough, and in fact the whole incident took place less than 100 metres from a large chemical works.
I should now explain the two words - call and song - that I have been using to refer to the sounds that birds make. All birds make sounds. The word call usually refers to the more simple vocalisations made by birds at any time of year for a multitude of purposes, including warning other birds that there is a predator nearby, scolding the predator in order to get them to go away, and keeping contact with other birds of the same species when flying in a flock.
The word ‘song’, however is generally used when talking about the sounds made by male birds setting up a territory, attracting a mate, and warning other male birds of the same species to ‘get out of my patch or expect trouble!’. Usually these songs are only found in the group of birds known as ‘passerines’ or perching birds, which is why this group of birds (which includes more than half of the worlds 10,000 or so bird species) is sometimes known as the 'songbirds'. Each species has its own distinctive song (although some can be very hard for a human to tell apart) - birds' songs vary immensely and can be very long and melodious like the Nightingale, quite short and a bit dull like the wheezing note of a European Greenfinch or rarely heard (by humans) at all like the Bullfinch’s quiet warble, or the raucous jumble that is a Magpie's song.
Because setting up and defending territory, and attracting mates is usually done by male birds, for a long time it was assumed that only male birds sang, or that if female birds sang at all it was very rare. Recent research by The Female Bird Song Project (https://earthsky.org/earth/female-birdsong-project) and others, however, is showing that ‘lady birds sing too’, and it’s not actually very rare. It seems to be most common in the tropics but several common and familiar birds in North America have singing females and it seems likely that it the situation is similar in Europe.
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