CD offers bird sounds for when nature just won't cooperate

SHARON WOOTTON

I'm trying to get in the mood to write about sex and the single bird, but I'm having a hard time.

The ice on the solarium panes is letting go and cascading like shards of glass, snow is covering everything but open water and the fire is working hard against the 28-degree weather.

This is spring? It's not the mood-setting scenario I had envisioned.

Several days ago I was a fan at a music concert pouring out of the trees and shrubs, listening to the "Come Hither" waltz and the sexy "What I Can Do For You" blues.

This week any nest-building plans must include beak-warmers, an extra layer of fluffy insulation and heating pads for eggs. Makes me want to run right there and distribute pulled-apart cotton balls.

Since desperation is the mother of invention, I loaded Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's CD "The Diversity of Animal Sound."

For about 75 years, Cornell researchers have wandered the planet recording animal calls, creating 150,000 hits in Cornell's Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds. What's particularly valuable about the 62-track CD is the 28-page booklet that puts the diverse sounds into behavioral context.

The CD is divided into courtship sounds of promiscuous males, territorial and courtship in polygynous species, territorial and courtship sounds of monogamous pairs, group defense and coordination signals, sounds used by prey to tell predators that they've been spotted, and calls from two extinct species.

Some sounds are haunting; others can only be described as bizarre (although I have heard some human music that fell in that subjective category).

The CD has a poignant ending. The last track is of the male kauai oo, calling out in a Kauai, Hawaii, swamp in 1976. No one answers. That species was less than a decade away from extinction. As so often happens, knowing that story casts a different light on the mating song.

Some sounds are familiar to any watcher of nature programs: the wailing call of a pair defending their territory, the howl of a wolf pack doing the same, the haunting sound of a bowhead whale, the bugling of an elk.

Others fall in the revelation category: the satin bowerbird's repetitive vocal display, a jaguar's panting call, the three-humped treehopper, whose plant-borne sounds were created by rapid vibration of his abdomen, and the grunts and hum from chorusing plainfin midshipman (fish) males.

All this has gotten me in the mood, but also reminds me of the funniest description I have yet to read of avian courtship, in Joey Slinger's hilarious "Down & Dirty Birding" (Fireside, 1996), a great read even if you hate birds.

As Slinger puts it, females get to shop around and males take potluck. First the guys have to defend their territories, and then convince the females -- any female -- that they're up to the highest standards of the species.

Most males have to try out every breeding season. Males' foreplay runs the gamut of head-tossing, fluttering and drooping wings, flashing their colors, building dummy nests, singing and drumming, preening their curly tail coverts (mallards), engaging in water-top sprints, soaring and spinning and diving.

The chosen male, hanging on for dear life, presses his orifice (cloaca) against the female's cloaca (an opening that serves both intestinal and genital purposes). Yes, the tail is something of an obstacle and since this act may take place on water, in the air, on a tree branch or on the ground, I'll let you imagine the gymnastics.

With few exceptions, it takes seconds, which is why the average birder doesn't become a voyeur very often.

Sharon Wootton lives on Shaw Island and can be reached at songandword@rockisland.com or 360-468-3964.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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