On the loud whistle mystery bird, I have had a towhee with a loud, clear,
energetic whistle ending in an occasional squeak in my neighborhood (near
the Arboretum) for the past two years. It really had me stumped until I
saw its lips move. In fact, there's another odd-calling towhee at
Discovery Park, it just doesn't sound anything like its usual rattling
call, just a whistle and squeak thing. If you hear it again, it's worth
looking at the treetops (again) for a towhee.

Abby
Seattle


On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Josh Hayes <coralliophila at live.com> wrote:

> As expected, the "mystery bird" is actually pretty common and easily
> identified once I actually SAW the bird doing the singing -- I described
> the song as a series of half a dozen high-pitched notes rising on a
> chromatic scale with a downward glissando at the end, as I recall, and it
> turns out to be golden-crowned kinglets. This also fits in with the "I only
> sing from truly annoyingly high tops of trees" bit.
>
> The Oregon recording at the Cornell site is a good approximation of the
> first part; the bit at the tail end seems to be rather different, but I put
> that down to geographic variation. The high-pitched LOUD whistle I heard a
> week or so ago and could not identify was not heard again after that day,
> which makes me think it was probably an escapee from someone's house,
> sadly. I fear that puzzle will not get solved, but it's good to have the
> common bird ID-ed!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Josh in Licton Springs (North Seattle)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tweeters mailing list
> Tweeters at u.washington.edu
> http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/tweeters
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20140703/0162272e/attachment.htm