Birdsong is one of the most familiar sounds of our environment, and a lot of the time you don't even notice it. It just gets filed away with background noise.
Recently, I've started to realise that, although I recognise most of the songs I hear around me, on account of hearing them repeatedly every year, I have almost no clue what bird is making any of them.
I tried to do a little bit of research to identify the most common ones, but it's harder than I imagined to do so without the help of someone knowledgeable. It's easy to find recordings of common birds' songs, but clicking through dozens or sometimes hundreds of .wav files attempting to locate the particular one you're looking for is daunting and tedious. And typing 'the bird song with that little flourish then the two big loud noises' doesn't produce productive results.
Since I think there are at least a couple of birders here at EvC, and I don't know any in real life, I thought I'd see if I could make any progress here.
The one I'm currently dealing with is one of the most common and easiest to describe. I live in Central Europe (Prague, to be precise), and it seems to be common here in the city, so it's an urban bird. I've noticed its call a lot in the last couple of weeks, so it's singing now, but how long it's been making noise for and how long it can continue I can't tell you.
Its call is loud, so you hear it clearly often. It's a simple, two-tone call, and it repeats the pair of tones about 5 times in a row, I think, before pausing and doing it again. ABE: It goes high-low-high-low-high-low-high-low-high-low if that helps.
Any guesses, or is my description hopelessly vague?
My first guess would be great tit. Especially in an urban environment. In woodland I'd be wondering about chiffchaff. But I'm not that great on song identification.
Yeah, I'm a birder, but North America. I'm also working on tying sounds to known birds and it isn't always that easy.
I tried to do a little bit of research to identify the most common ones, but it's harder than I imagined to do so without the help of someone knowledgeable. It's easy to find recordings of common birds' songs, but clicking through dozens or sometimes hundreds of .wav files attempting to locate the particular one you're looking for is daunting and tedious. And typing 'the bird song with that little flourish then the two big loud noises' doesn't produce productive results.
I listened to a recording of the Great Tit, and this sounds like what I was looking for. It makes sense, since, excluding magpies and pigeons, Great Tits and blackbirds are the birds I see most often. Retrospect suggests that might have been a sensible first choice to check!
To celebrate figuring this out, here's a couple of local tits. They're not singing though,.
I've never used whatbird.com before: I always used All About Birds from Cornell University: after a quick skim, though, whatbird.com seems to have a much better browser tool with a lot more options.
For everyone: do they have resources like this for European birds? I visited Poland a couple years ago, and I hadn't thought about birding before I got there, so I didn't have a field guide. Then, I couldn't find a good online guide once I got there.
The RSPB site is pretty good for British birds, so that would cover quite a lot of the European ones, at least in Northern Europe. They have a Bird Identifier, which is okay and also they have the birds by name and family, with an individual page for each. The pages have sound files, which I think is often the most reliable point of identification in the field.
Here is the page for the Great Tit, with a recording of it making its "creaking gate" call, the one that Caffiene mentioned in the OP. What it doesn't have is much variety for birds that have varied songs and calls.
Of course, Great tits have plenty more calls available. There is a rule of thumb amongst UK birders that if you hear an unfamiliar song, it's probably a Great Tit!
First thought was Northern Flicker, but now think (male) Gila Woodpecker due to black and white striping and perching on saguaro which they use for nests
Chickadees are now usually placed in a new genus, Poecile, after a big shakeup of Parus a few years ago. There are two Poecile species in the UK, Marsh and Willow Tit. They are nightmarishly difficult to tell apart.
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