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Songs of Colorado
A Songbird Primer The Silent Spring Looms The Dawn Chorus A Birder's Code Of Ethics DOW Working For Wildlife: Songbirds Pawnee National Grasslands Birding Loop

The evening was calm and beautiful, the sky sparkled with stars. . .Suddenly there burst on my soul the serenade of the rose-breasted bird, so rich, so mellow, so loud in the stillness of the night that sleep fled from my eyelids. Never did I enjoy music more.

John James Audubon, 1834, upon hearing the song of a rose-breasted grosbeak

I tot I taw a puddy tat. . .I did! I did taw a puddy tat!

Tweetie Bird, upon seeing Sylvester the Cat.

Dickie birds, garden birds, passerines, perching birds, little brown jobs (LBJ's), tweetie birds. There are a million names for the many small, twittering birds we know as songbirds.

So what is a songbird?

Any bird that sings a pretty song could be called a "song bird". For our purposes we'll talk about those busy, familiar perching birds, or passerines, that sing melodious songs. (For technophiles, "true" songbirds are those belonging to the suborder Passeres).

Songbirds comprise an estimated 50% of all bird species. Included are larks, swallows, crows, titmice, nuthatches, creepers, wren-tits, dippers, wrens, mockingbirds, thrushes, warblers, flycatchers, pipits, waxwings, shrikes, starlings, vireos, blackbirds, tanagers, sparrows, and finches.

Though lumped into one category, songbirds are really very different from one another, encompassing a range of feeding strategies, body designs, and behaviors. Take beaks, for example. Grosbeaks (meaning literally "large beak") have thick, heavy bills for cracking open seeds. The bizarre, crossed-over beak of the crossbill is specialized for getting at seeds in pine cones. Nuthatches and creepers have longer, pointy bills for probing into bark. Robins have stabbing bills for grabbing insects from grass. Swallows have wide bills that open in a gape, then snap shut around flying insects. Generalists like crows have a bill in between those of seed and insect-eaters. Adapted for different ecological niches, many different species can live in the same habitat—nuthatches and creepers on the trunks of trees, warblers and chickadees among the foliage, towhees on the ground.

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Colorado—with its wide variety of wilderness and urban habitats—is home to an even wider variety of songbirds. On the plains we can see longspurs, meadowlarks, and lark buntings. In riparian areas, look for warblers, orioles, blackbirds, and finches. Our mountain forests attract crossbills, grosbeaks, tanagers, siskins, jays, and nuthatches. On the tundra are rosy finches and pipits, with warblers in willow thickets. Our own backyards provide important habitat for a large variety of resident and migrating songbirds. And because Colorado is at the edge of many species' ranges, wooded areas along our eastern reservoirs and waterways are good places to see both eastern and western races of birds like the northern oriole (Bullock's and Baltimore) and the dark-eyed junco.

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The rituals of bird courtship provide a song and dance act for wildlife watchers. Males are dressed up in brightly colored plumage to attract females and warn competing males. Meadowlarks point their beaks up and jump in the air to display their yellow breasts. Red-winged blackbirds flash their scarlet wing patches (or epaulets), as they sing, proclaiming (both visually and vocally) territorial ownership and their fitness as mates. Many songbirds display by crouching and fluttering their wings rapidly or fanning their wings and tail and marching in front of the female. But singing is the main way a songbird struts his stuff.

Bird song is usually associated with breeding, though some birds, like the dipper, sing throughout the year. A song is a long series of uninterrupted sounds given in a pattern. Technically, even the tapping of woodpeckers and the booming of prairie-chickens are songs. Males do most of the singing, and songs serve to proclaim territory, warn off other males, and attract a mate. Or sometimes birds may just sing out of sheer joy of being alive!

The syrinx, or voicebox, of a bird is located at the bottom of the windpipe, not up top like ours. Birds lack vocal cords but achieve their marvelous melodies by expelling air across delicate membranes in the syrinx, controlling the pitch via muscles attached to these membranes.
 
Birds usually sing from one or more favorite perches. Watch the birds in your backyard or a meadow-lark in a grassy meadow, and you'll soon identify each songster's perches. Most songbirds have two or more songs, though the brown thrasher has a repertoire of more than 3000 songs. Some birds sing a soft "whisper song" while sitting on eggs, possibly an expression of contentment. Studies indicate birds must learn to sing, but have an inherent "blueprint" for the song of their own species. Bluebirds raised hearing no bird song ignored recordings of other species' songs, but showed great interest when played a typical bluebird song, which they learned in five minutes.

In contrast to a song, a call is a short note or series of notes given for a specific reason—as a warning, out of fear, to keep in contact with mates or flock members. While no two bird species have the same song, species that flock together, like nuthatches, chickadees and titmice, have similar call notes.

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Birds are tied to the calendar. Migrate in, court, mate, nest, incubate, brood, fledge young, fatten, migrate out. Many species entering Colorado in spring can be found in wooded riparian areas along eastern streams and rivers. Some stay on the grasslands while others move into the foothills and montane forests for nesting. In late summer when the young have fledged, they move even higher to the subalpine forests and alpine tundra. Here they find abundant food as these mountain habitats reach the height of their growing season. Then the process is reversed; the birds move back down the slopes, out across the plains, then to their wintering grounds. Most Colorado songbirds migrate out of state in winter to habitats where resources are more abundant. Recent studies indicate our western birds winter mainly in western Mexico, while eastern birds move to Costa Rica, the Yucatan, Caribbean and eastern Latin America. Some of our species, like gray jays and Clark's nutcrackers, migrate altitudinally within the state, moving to lower elevations where food is more available. Come winter, mountain dwellers like Steller's jays and mountain chickadees show up at foothills feeders.

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The young of most songbirds are altricial—born naked, blind and helpless. Both adults usually rear the young. The peeping and gaping mouths of the nestlings trigger a feeding response in the parents. The adult bird's feeding response is so strong that when a bird's nest is destroyed, it may feed the young of another bird, sometimes even a different species. A cardinal was observed feeding the gaping mouths of goldfish used to begging from people.

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After the young have fledged (left the nest) many birds form large flocks, often with other species, and begin feeding in preparation for migration. Huge flocks of red-winged blackbirds, one of males and another of females and young, roost in the marsh by night, descending on fields and meadows by day to feed. Blackbirds, grackles, cowbirds, and starlings may gather in raucous flocks numbering a million birds. Birds flock for an age-old reason—safety in numbers. There are many more watchers so each individual spends more time foraging, and the alarm call of one alerts the entire group. The sudden flush of the flock may confuse predators, and the chances of being the one nabbed by a predator, out of hundreds in a flock, are small. Mixed flocks take advantage of differing species skills. Downy woodpeckers, with close-focusing vision, rely on the broader-sighted chickadees and titmice as sentinels. Flocking may also improve feeding success. A group can overcome the territorial defenses of a few individuals and move into an area to feed. In mixed flocks each species forages in its niche—woodpeckers peck into the bark, nuthatches scour the bark surface, chickadees and titmice glean the leaves—reducing competition for food.

With no trees to provide song perches, grassland songbirds perform wonderful song flights, called larking, to make themselves seen and heard in spring. The male horned lark wings high in the air and circles, his singing audible high overhead, then folds his wings and plummets straight down, pulling up just above the ground. Our state bird, the lark bunting, is a joy to watch in spring as the courting male flies high up then sails down in a gentle spiral on stiff, outstretched wings, singing musically.

Next: The Silent Spring Looms

(The information contained in these issues of Colorado's Wildlife Company was accurate at the time of original publication. Situations and circumstances described, staff positions, contact information, and dates of some events may have changed in the interim. Present knowledge and understanding of biological and behavioral facts and information may also be different than presented here.)