Day: 7 March 2025

My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88x31 button representing "me" (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme).

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88x31 animated GIF button in the Web 1.0 style, reading "DAN Q". The letter Q is spinning.

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The same image, but expanded so it's larger.

How do birds hear the calls of species of bird other than their own? Is it like background noise that they can talk (sing) over, filtering out everything but the calls of their own kind, like how you can talk over the murmur of a cocktail party until the second somebody says your name? Or is it more like something they consciously observe and work around, like waiting for your turn to speak in a group conversation flitting between several different topics?

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Early springtime view of bare trees over green-brown fields under a sky dappled with clouds.

Either way: is such communication strategy an instinctive or a learned behaviour? It seems likely that at least part of birdsong communication is gained after hatching because birds from noisy cities are louder than their country cousins (although you wouldn't know it, to listen out of the bedroom window of my rural home, this morning!).

Just a moment's curiosity for the morning.