Bird Language - Shapes of Alarm

[Music] what do we mean by a shape of an alarm when you spent enough time on a landscape and you listen and you watch behaviors you'll start to notice that bird behavior that indicates the presence of a predator for instance doesn't happen in a random form it always has a shape it always has a kind of a personality to it and they're each different personality is is unique enough that you can literally learn to tell them apart they're not quite as easy as saying that's a pigeon and that's a crow but you can definitely recognize things like that's definitely a nest robber you know you don't know for instance if it's going to be a raven or if it's gonna be a crow but you know it's a nest robber and you know it immediately so it is that accurate enough time and experience in one place and you can get pretty darn good at accurately figuring out what shape means what species pretty much exactly and that has to do with experience in a place not just the shapes so combine what you know about the five voices with what you're gonna learn about the shapes and get to know your area that you like to sit and you'll soon find yourself surprised at how much you actually can tell from what's going on from these shapes when you're looking for shapes of alarm the first thing you're going to want to do is tune into the background context of your landscape you're going to want to look at the landscape and become familiar with it and you're gonna and you're gonna want to know where are the food sources right now where would I experience feeding Birds where would I experience birds nesting where might I experience Birds hiding for cover where might an animal trail move through a landscape like here where I'm sitting now there's a there's a thicket down below me where a creek is moving through there's an open meadow over here there's tall trees over here they're all have different contextualize that will influence what we're about to talk about you know and if everything was exactly the same on the landscape shapes would be easier to identify course because everything would be exactly the same and anything that moved around would cause a very distinct pattern so you have to account for both the baseline diversity and the baseline behaviors before you actually start to see the shapes so here's the first shape this is the shape that you don't ever want to cause again imagine you've been sitting at your sit spot 10 days in a row for an hour each time and you've gotten to know that place pretty well over there there's some spot at ohi's over here there's usually juncos feeding over here some song sparrows like to go up into that one shrub I see some robins over there everyone seems happy then one day you're sitting at your sit spot and you notice robin's flying suddenly and directly over your head and you're like whoa what's your hurry where are you going then you see the song sparrows fly by and you notice other birds kind of shooting this way and you're like huh wonder what that's about and then you're sitting there and two minutes or so later all of a sudden you start to hear sounds over there and you look and you crane your neck oh it's my neighbor walking briskly towards my house she looks like she's mad again about something that's a bird plow literally you don't want to make that shape that's the shape that basically says the birds are fearing your approach for some reason when I first saw that shape with with people walking briskly and by the way that with that brisk walk I'm talking about is a normal walk if you're downtown Portland or Seattle or Newark New Jersey you're gonna see everybody in that walk so don't look for some strange you know aberrant hunting behavior we're talking about what modern people just call normal walking it's not a stroll it's a it's your brisk walk the one that's used on the sidewalk that particular walk going a dove is a twosie and in a straight line and a direct line creates what we call a bird plow now there's there's other forms of bird plows a bird plot basically means a source of energy Birds scattering you know this source of energy could be an approaching a sip etre causing the birds to scatter in a particular way and we'll talk about that it has a particular shape to it or it could be a person walking briskly scaring the birds I used to think in the beginning that there must be something really terrible about us you know we must be like holding really bad thoughts or something because why would birds be so afraid of a person walking makes no sense because it's not like you see the neighbor coming and throwing sticks at Birds she's not actually angry at the birds then I came to understand with enough observation and enough experience that a person walking briskly in a landscape often causes a Cooper's hawk to follow from behind or sharp-shinned hawk to come in from behind and this was observed in the Presidio in San Francisco a jogger with you know some headphones on jogging and a sharp-shinned hawk following the jogger and taking advantage of the bird plow they're creating similar to the way a dolphin you know will follow the wake of a ship and get the fish that are disoriented off the bow wake so maybe the bird plow is more of a concern on the birds part not that there's a Cooper's Hawk coming with every person that's walking up but here comes another person walking in that way that seems to always attract that Cooper's hawk so birds are getting out of there just in case I really haven't figured out why maybe you can but let's put it this way the bird plow is not a compliment from the birds point of view my favorite of all alarms is the Sentinel it's the most common and it's the most commonly misconstrued when you're sitting at your sit spot you'll see three or four birds all parked up in the trees looking in that direction and people will almost always in the beginning say oh yeah there are some birds resting during the second period of the sit and I'll say birds resting what do you mean well they were just kind of sitting up in the open and they were all just kind of sitting there were they looking in the same direction yeah they were actually huh were they all fluffed up and kind of preening oh no no they were sitting really still hmm that's actually an alarm that's not a baseline behavior well they don't look alarmed no they're being still and quiet but they're definitely paying attention it would be like you know you and I are having a conversation and suddenly we hear you know the under throated growl of a leopard moving through the thicket right so you and I will stop talking and we'll go like this for as long as it takes that's Sentinel basically it's a form of stillness and watching and it it it has a look to it you know the birds are flying towards something they're curious about landing in a high position and looking towards alarm one thing to know about Sentinel which I really really love is that often behind a Sentinel from the birds but behind it is where baseline often is and the reason that so is because if I'm a song sparrow and I have a Cooper's hawk in my neighborhood and I don't quite know where that Cooper's hawk is right now I don't feel comfortable feeding out in the open so I'll have to feed in the thicket over here but there's some good insects to grab right over there but I can't get to them right now because it's too risky to go out in the open but all of a sudden the scrub Jay comes in and lands and goes in a sentinel position over here and looks that way I'm like oh cool he knows where the Cooper's Hawk says he's watching he's got my back so to speak now I go behind his back and feet so you'll often hear songs just behind Sentinel you'll see maintenance behavior just behind Sentinel it's not always but you'll often see that so you can say in some ways that a sentinel could represent the edge of an alarm and behind the edge of the alarm begins the baseline pattern but once again there's no rules in bird language there's patterns and principles but there's no hard and fast rules watch for that pattern well here's a peculiar thing that happens to people and boy don't they wish it was true I'm sitting in my my sit spot here I've been here for five days now in a row feeling pretty good about myself I've been going to my sit spot for a month and a half I'm sorry really get there I'm thank telling myself and I know it's true because there's all these juncos feeding very close to me in fact not just juncos I'm particularly proud because right over there under the picnic table in my yard right while I'm sitting here is that usually shy telly feeding right there where I can see it John Kosir telly there huh you know a song sparrow down under the thicket right there next to me I must be getting pretty spiritual because these birds are coming awfully close to me we hear that one a lot especially in the beginning of people's bird language experience often what that means is there's a Cooper's hawk in the tree right over there and these birds haven't been able to eat for hours and so they see you sitting there and they're like perfect let's go feed by him because we know the Cooper's Hawk doesn't like to come close to people we call this safety barrier and safety barrier kind of like Sentinel is a commonly misinterpreted behavior when you think birds are being awful friendly and and they're feeding out in the open or close to you ask the question of yourself are they under things so for instance under cars or under the branches of an overhanging bush that's often an indication that they they're telling you that the danger is up and above they're letting you see them but they're not letting someone over there see them you know up and above so ask yourself also is it really quiet right now all around me and the only baseline behavior I see is right next to me you know that's that's how you recognize this safety barrier it shows up in a lot of different ways it isn't just with people sitting at their sit spot you'll see other other forms of safety barrier pay attention for that more common than the tunnel of silence is what we call the zone of oppression and the zone of oppression is often accompanying that Sentinel behavior we talked about earlier a Cooper's hawk whose hunting sneaks into an area lands in this doug-fir tree right here you can't really see it from anywhere down on the ground the whole place goes silent and there's a pillow of silence we call it a pillow of silence or a zone of oppression kind of spherical shape on the landscape where no birds sound can be heard this is a common shape and it's often more common than you realize because in most city parks or suburban neighborhoods there's always a Cooper's Hawk around so on a 10:00 a.m. April morning on a beautiful day with no wind there should be a lot of birdsong there should be a lot of baseline there's nothing the place is silent and in the distance you can hear alarms over here and you can see Sentinel birds over here looking in this direction they're looking at a hawk somewhere in here that you can see that's actually more common than you realize watch for that one we call it this the zone of oppression let's look at a weasel alarm for a second with the cat you have a slowly moving parabolic for a hunting cat for a snake or a nest robber or an owl you have a static parabolic it sits in one place for a weasel what you have is a sudden burst of parabolic energy that's very excited and then it stops and then it shows up again over here with a lot of excitement then it stops then it shows up over here and then it's back over here and then there's periods in between so it's an interrupted parabolic with a lot more excitement that's because weasels appear disappear appear and disappear when the weasel is visible to the birds they form that parabolic that's excited because they see it they were telling everybody about it and they're also afraid it's going to disappear any second which it does when it disappears they look around nervously they fly from place to place um times they'll change position so they're not taken from behind or something like that weasels will often show up here then show up there and then show up here again just to kind of mess with the birds I think weasels are definitely more common than people realize and they're often more prevalent on a landscape and it's often That Bird alarm that tells you easels are around long before you see your first weasel so just because you've never seen a weasel doesn't mean they're not they're not they're that particular alarm shape is usually indicative that a weasel is in your landscape when people first begin learning bird language they report that it's all just confusing there's just noise and there's just too much going on and there's too many sounds and I don't know what's happening and that's how it feels in the beginning but just you know bear with that pattern and by visiting the same place over and over again you'll begin to get to know the individuals who live there and you'll get to know their baseline patterns and that becomes the foundation for understanding and seeing the shapes pop out if you will okay so be patient give yourself some time and and be be out there regularly and you'll and you'll ugh you'll eventually get to see this stuff for yourself

Channel: BirdLanguage

Views: 551

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: wcuHZBRPdkE

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020