How to Recognize Woodpeckers by Their Drumming Sounds
allaboutbirds.org
allaboutbirds.org
Their media player with the spectrogram is wonderful and does so much to enhance the appreciation of each birdsong. As a lifelong synthesizer programmer and composer I appreciate the ability to visualize each song.
They even offer a quick-start guide for recording birdsong as well as a paid course to learn in greater depth. My kind of people!
Birds are endlessly fascinating and I'm delighted to see such a well presented ode to their beauty.
The sound is obnoxious and they’ve basically destroyed my house. I’ve tried everything to keep them away but they are tenacious. We’re currently saving up to reside the house with Hardie Board; I think that’s the only solution.
I thought he was putting holes in my house for a while until I figured out what he was doing. I have a lot of flickers around too, but don't hear them drumming very often.
It have spent hours, half aslep, pondering what that sound could be, it took quite a while before I found the origin!
I used to joke that they'll let you know when they're out of suet, by hammering your gutters to wake you up at 6am.
So no more suet for the woodpeckers.
And fortunately, I'm usually up by 4 or 5 am anyway so he's never woken me up, but yes, he's banging away really early.
Lovely birds.
And, on the topic of tapping, I imagine even the cadence of our keystrokes can be used to construct meaningful browser fingerprints. We are always emitting so many artefacts that can be used to construct rich identities. It's a bit terrifying from a surveillence perspective but also very satisfying to create order from noise.
I’m in radiology and knowing what the MR scanner is doing from a few rooms away is something many of us can do.
‘The TR is wrong’
Presumably common in other fields with noisy machines.
He's drumming on the metal chimney cap because it's the loudest thing he can find.
The hammering is how they find eachother over long distances. Just heard some the other day hammering on my gutter. Went out to scare him off, and lo and behold there were two pairs outside frolicking around in the trees.
A couple years ago I saw one while I was out on my back deck, he started hammering, then about 2 minutes later a female shows up, and they flew off together.
I guess if it's the end of the world the last people will go to the party.
Sample quote:
> It’s especially important to pay attention to speed and duration of the drumming
Imagine if someone described the different leaf characteristics (shapes, arrangement, edges, etc) and used local-to-them trees as illustrations. Is that useless to me? Or can I perhaps find an analog from the trees native to my city?
You'll develop an ear for it the more you practice. You might not be able to actually find the bird once you've found the tree. They can be hard to spot from the ground.
My grandfather would be able to do this almost instantly. We would be out on his ranch and hear them all the time; every once in awhile he would listen, turn and point in a direction to show me where the bird was that he spotted, and tell me what kind of woodpecker it was. I never saw the bird myself as much as he tried to point it out to me.
The man had hearing and vision super powers to me. He would spot edible plants in overgrown pasture and woods, spot a particular type of tree in the middle of a bunch of other trees and hear the location of wildlife stalking about the woods. And it was insane how much information he had about the natural world around us and the skill to utilize it.