Hello Richard and others,

We currently have resident Anna's Hummingbirds at our residence and have had them for the past 6 years now and it is a common occurrence to hear them giving the somewhat high pitch call note,especially during breeding season. This call note is nothing related to the typical metallic "chip" notes the birds give when they are at our feeders,etc. We first started noticing the sharp call the second year that we had Anna's Hummingbirds and it was definitely a different sound,but we quickly found out it was them giving it! We have never heard the sharp call note in the wild,but are sure it occurs. We are aware that Anna's Hummingbirds breed throughout the year and currently we are hearing the call note on an almost daily basis along with typical breeding behavior where the male with give his flight display/dive. Perhaps other birders can attest to this,but it is what we observe in our yard and we keep a daily diary of it,as well as other sightings we have in our yard. We currently have at least 3 adult male,3 adult female and 3-4 immature Anna's Hummingbirds,but we never pursue where they actually have their nest,but we know they do breed somewhere very nearby. It is a common sight to also see multiple Anna's Hummingbird chasing around our yard too.

Sincerely,

Ruth and Patrick Sullivan
Fircrest,WA
godwit513 at msn.com


----- Original Message -----
From: Pterodroma at aol.com
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Cc: Ladyshrike at aol.com
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2006 1:41 PM
Subject: [Tweeters] a shocking discovery!


Oh my God! I just made a most shocking discovery in the yard a few minutes ago. So shocking as to be downright exhilarating! As absolutely and utterly tiny and simple as this may seem to the more enlightened of you than me, this may in fact be the highlight of MY whole year, decade even, maybe even my life! How can something SO BIG be SO SMALL?!!?


All this time (years!) I've heard this mysterious loud ear piercing barking sound emanating from something somewhere with a seemingly quite ventriloquil quality that I could never pin point much less see. Something that forceful, that loud, so much so I often hear it from as far as one or even two blocks away! Something that forceful, that loud, surely must be some kind of mammal. Chipmunk, no. Douglas Squirrel, no. So I finally settled on Aplodontia since I have had a long running battle with them for years. Or, I'm just prejudice and need a scapegoat. I figured they were probably barking from a tunnel entrance but couldn't explain why sometimes they seem really really close and above my head in a clump of rhododendron. Inches! I could never spot the source. It usually happens on nice warm days, and even nice cold ones (like this one), and even not so nice ones and year round. I have even posted about this alleged 'Aplodontia' bark on Tweeters in years past. Boy, have I ever been wrong, wrong, wrong; so soo wrong, I will probably be excommunicated from the nature community.



So, here I am around 10:30am standing around in the backyard doing what else but working on my contribution to the "Great Backyard Bird Count" when my eye catches a sunlit moth / dragonfly like glint of something hovering way way far high in the cold blue sky. I put my bins on it and low & behold, it's a male Anna's Hummingbird hovering way up there. A moment later, it plunges earthward toward the top of the rhodie swooping up at the last moment which coincidentally resulted in that all too familiar loud barking sound. Who did that I wonder; coincidence? It repeated several times, same thing same sound, as I was mentally adjusting myself to just what exactly was going on. Was there an Aplodontia up there in bush top responding to being buzzed by a courting Anna's Hummingbird? THAT seemed a little far fetched. Or, was that loud, ear piercing, bark actually the Anna's Hummingbird? THAT seemed a little far fetched too but becoming maybe plausible. Once the hummingbird stopped the diving, so stopped the barking.



So, Anna's Hummingbird courtship flight note it is me thinks, which left me with another vastly vexing question. Why have I never heard or at the very least been aware of this now way too familiar, if not sometimes annoying sound anywhere else? [Read: "annoying" in the context of one of those exasperating and largely invisible Aplodontias hell bent to ravage the rhodies and undermine the hillside]. I mean I am very much aware of Anna's Hummingbirds anywhere along the West Coast when I see them, whether from just around western Washington, or from southern BC to southern California, yet to my recollection, I have never heard this bark anywhere else but in my own backyard. As distinctive and deeply ingrained familiar as the bark is and with my now seemingly incorrect assumption shattering now in what I had long thought was an Aplodontia, I would naturally pick up on it instantly if I ever heard it anywhere else. Why this sound so specific to just my yard and nowhere else? Anna's Hummingbirds must be doing making the very same sounds everywhere else but I just don't detect it or am aware. OTOH, maybe..., I just feed mine so well, TOO WELL, that here they just EXPLODE rather than subtly going 'pop' and if they are just going about 'popping' somewhere else, I don't hear them or they don't register as anything out of the ordinary.



So, this new discovery and suspicion temporarily scuttled the 'Great Backyard Bird Count' which was shaping up unfortunately to be quite busy at that time, and sent me rushing off to do a little research. A quick google search, "Anna's Hummingbird courtship flight" instantly brought up as item #1, a most enlightening piece of information from none other than our very own Seattle Audubon Society's website, specifically at:

http://birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?id=262

which in part reads as follows:



"Behavior:

One of the most distinctive behaviors of the Anna's Hummingbird is the male's courtship flight dive. He flies high in the air and then plummets. At the bottom of the dive, he makes a loud, distinctive popping noise, called the "dive noise." The origin of the dive noise is not fully understood, but is thought to be mostly vocal. The vocalization may or may not be supplemented with noise from air rushing through the feathers. In addition to the dive noise, the very vocal Anna's Hummingbird makes a variety of buzzes, chips, and chatters. Both males and females defend feeding territories, although males defend them more diligently and for a longer period of time."



"The dive noise?" Interesting choice of not very scientific sounding words for a description which kind of hints to me that I may not be the first person in the world, scientist/ornithologist even, perplexed by this strange loud forced barking sound initially attributed to a mammal or some other critter. I have issues with the words, 'popping noise' too. This ain't no simple 'pop!' This is a very loud large rodent like bark! I have read the descriptions in bird guides and life history material about the 'popping or snapping' of wing maybe combined with voice that Anna's and other hummingbirds make at the bottom of their courtship swoops and dives, and a simple little barely audible 'snap' registers in my mind as something entirely different from some ear piercing loud rodent like 'bark' audible from as far as ONE BLOCK AWAY! How can something so small and so delicate as a tiny little bejeweled hummingbird make such an explosive racket as this? It's clearly audible through the walls of the house even with the radio, tv, or stereo cranked up and I can hear it right now as I write and KING-FM is on. I can't even hear my neighbors insane Great Dane's ceaseless barking through the walls, but maybe that's only because it's drowned out by the courtship diving and wall piercing 'exploding' Anna's Hummingbird(s).



So, mystery solved, case closed. And maybe I was successful after all in my live trapping Aplodontia campaign last winter / spring in rounding up 8 of those fascinating but pesky critters and transplanting them to the Cascade foothills east of North Bend. As for today's Anna's Hummingbird experience, whatever you want to call it, it just goes to show, that sometimes, the most exciting discoveries are there awaiting as close as in your own backyard.



Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, the Great Backyard Bird Count. I guess I'll have to start all over.



****************************************************
Richard Rowlett
Bellevue (Eastgate), WA, USA

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought" --Albert Szent-Gyorgi (1893-1986).
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