20 July 2013. Burlington ON. I remember two of my earliest encounters with the Carolina Wren, on both occasions I heard the bird and it baffled me. At Point Pelee sometime in the early eighties I heard a lound ringing ‘weedly weedly weedly” from high in the hardwood canopy . I had absolutely no idea what I was hearing but I stored the song away for another day. Similarly and many years later I was driving along a residential stretch of the lakeshore , an area of mature homes and generous tree cover, I caught a few moments of a clear multi-syllable song echoing in the parklike gardens. Again, I had no idea, and again I tucked the memory away for another day. It was not until many years later, as Carolina Wrens became more common and I more experienced, that I put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Today I was doing a drive-around to inspect a number of residential properties in preparation for a meeting a couple of days hence. I was back in that same neighbourhood of mature homes and generous tree cover referred to above. I was neither surprised nor puzzled this time to hear Carolina Wren song but what was notable was that there were two birds singing and it seemed pretty evident that each was making quite clear to the other that they had better not come any closer. Their song is distinctive in its full-bodied and rounded tones and the phrasing, while variable, is unmistakable. The two birds today were singing slightly different songs, one an emphatic and challenging “Sh-beedle, sh-beedle, sh-beedle” and the other was pitched a little lower and had more of a resigned exhaling quality: ‘chew-lee chew-lee chew lee.”
I’m not particularly well versed on the subject and subtleties of bird song, but I recently read that while competing individual chickadee songs may sound superficially identical to us, changes in pitch affect the responses of different birds and their apparent perception of relative dominance. Were these two slightly different wren songs nothing more than two neighbours with different voices maintaining property lines or was there an infinitely more complex interaction going on?
We have just emerged from of a a week of punishing heat and humidity that ended abruptly in a night of loud and destructive thunderstorms. I don’t how birds made out, but I stayed indoors and attended to some long postponed chores in the basement, the coolest place in the house. If ever there was confirmation that I’m a fair-weather birder that was it. On my rounds today I stopped at a couple of places along the shoreline of Lake Ontario to gaze across its flat expanse. I saw a long line of Double Crested Cormorants flying low over the waters and took a couple of quick pictures although I hardly expected they’d be keepers. On closer examination I was struck by the abstract effect the heat haze and atmospheric distortion made upon the pictures. For what it’s worth, here they are. (You’ll need to log on to the website to see these. They don’t or won’t work within an email, if that’s how you’re reading me.)
