I once had a Great Horned Owl in the fall trying to hoot. I assumed it
was a younger bird as it was quite unsuccessful. Other birds grow to
perfect songs as well, and some odd things can be heard in the summer
Ray K


> Don Nelson writes:
> >
> > The last few sunny mornings as I left for work, I heard an unusual bird
> > singing from the branches of our birch tree. "A sparrow," I thought, "but
> > a new one to me!" The binos revealed a song sparrow curiously distorting
> > a song sparrow song: my impression was that it was a brave attempt at
> > song by a young male who hadn't quite got all the trills and glissando's yet.
> >
> > Do birds 'grow into' their mature voice and complexity of song?
>
> Yes, definitely.
> I'll take as a nexample a bird very familiar to me (probably not for most
> of you), the Chaffinch _Fringilla coelebs_.
>
> In this species, as in many others *I think*, reproductive "paraphernalia"
> (this includes testes and vocal apparatus), which represents an important part
> (well, many percent) of the breeding bird's weight, is reduced in winter to a
> few tenth of a percent.
> In late winter/early spring, the guys have to regrow all the stuff again...
> In particular, their vocal apparatus being regrowing, you can imagine that they
> don't really sing "right" (usually much shorter phrases ending *very* weirdly)
> until the full regrowth.
>
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------------
> The Comet cometh, Gromit gromith.
> Serge Le Huitouze Intelligent Software Group
> email: serge at cs.sfu.ca School of Computing Science
> tel: (604) 291-5423 Simon Fraser University
> fax: (604) 291-3045 Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6 CANADA
>

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Ray Korpi "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
Hm: Portland, OR --from "Birches"
Wk: Clark College by Robert Frost
Vancouver, WA
rkorpi at clark.edu