Tag: birds

Drinking a coffee while editing a podcast episode in the beautiful Ullswater valley, and this lovely little pied wagtail came by to say good morning!

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Pied Wagtail (motacilla alba yarrelli) atop a dry stone wall.

A lot of things are hard right now. But I appreciate that Spring has come and I can enjoy a cheese & pickle sandwich and a fake beer for lunch in the sun. All to the sounds of the birds singing... and, somewhere behind me, the dog excitedly demolishing a pile of pine cones.

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Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and long hair, sits at a wooden picnic bench in front of a sandwich, crisp packet, and can of Lucky Saint.

It could be worse, right?

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.