Yeah, who are they? Well, be patient and I'll explain. These are some of the names of contributing authors with by-lines in Peterson Field Guide for Mexican Birds. These authors' contribution is to provide the reader and bird watchers with the voice of birds. Oh-oh. If you've spent any time in a bird book you may guess where I'm going.
This whole experience started after a slight seasonal change in the area brought back a number of birds. Do not get me wrong, I love them. As my cat sits on my lap most mornings, I enjoy my first cup of coffee with binoculars identifying birds by sight and sound. But this particular bird started its ruckus when I am still in bed, every morning. Through the open patio doors came this bird voice that sounded like a chicken with a bad cold that had just laid an egg but could not clear her throat to produce the expected cackle. Now I have friends who are avid birders but they were away for 2 months on a birding caravan. So I decided I should email them. Ready? Here it comes.
If I was going to e-mail them, I was going to have to put this bird voice in writing so they would know of which bird I speak. I will give you this test so that you can appreciate what I needed to do. Everyone reading or hearing this write down the sound a car makes going by your house traveling over cobblestones. Go ahead. Do not forget to eliminate the sound of the car engine, the loose bumper, the lawn sprinklers and the birds. Get the idea?
Here was the gist of my e-mail to my bird watching experts:
The sound is less than attractive or pleasing and is a boringly repetitive whistle of two short bursts. It occurs mostly in the mornings very early but I occasionally hear it during the day. When I was in kindergarten, the kindergarten band all had the standard six or eight hole, black, plastic recorders. The mouth piece came off for cleaning, I suppose, and blowing into the mouth piece I swear produced the exact sound and pitch that I was hearing. The more I thought about it the more I was sure I had nailed the sound of the endless double toot.
A week or so later, I actually got a reply from the bird watching caravan, now in Belize. They assured me it was nothing more than a nest of baby rufus backed thrushes squawking for food. Well, I did not buy that for a minute and though my birding experiences are nearly nil, I would recognize a nest of baby robins squawking for food. I had experienced that many times. I refused to give up.
When it comes to an authority on birds you go to Peterson Field Guides - Mexican Birds. Did you think I would never get back to Slud, Eisenmann, Chalif and Blake? In the very front of the book go to "How to Use This Book" page xx, under voice, in the middle of the page. There you will find this:
"We have used our own voice descriptions when possible and have supplemented these from other sources, (you know who) some published, so not. Each voice description is credited so if it does not sound that way to you, the onus is on the interpreter."
There are 1038 bird species identified in my issue. Please let me digress and let me use my imagination, not in a creative sense, but just to think about what it would take to get my description of a birds voice published in such a respected book.
There has to be a committee or panel to hear or read the input from these "voice" authors, doesn't there? Now who would you suspect would be picked to make a legitimate judgment on 1038 Mexican bird voices? I would not leave out the publishers' very attractive niece who has three art degrees and welds bicycle frames into works of art.
Then consider this, which hopefully the "voice authors" did, though it is never mentioned. Do birds make different calls in the morning than in the evening? Are the voices different during mating season? Do the birds make different calls when there are bird watchers in the area? My uneducated guess is that the answer to each question is yes.
Now what? The committee asks for voices to be submitted and if there is a conflict between authors for the voice of the same bird, what then? Publish both? No way. I mean what does the committee know after all?
I wanted to know. So I looked at the voice in print for all 1038 Mexican birds. Guess what. Three names dominated throughout the book? Yep, Slud, Eisenmann, and Chalif. Big time; probably 75 % of the voices credited. Wait, nothing wrong with that, they would be a riot at your next social outing. However, the voices submitted by two of the expert voice authors that we rely on for bird identification almost never agree. Wait. Stronger! The voices they sent in never even come close in many cases. I'll give you three examples and you can check out the rest.
STRIPED CUCKOO
Chalif - A high clear 2 note whistle, feen-feeen (2nd note half a tone higher) repeated at steady intervals
Eisenmann - A melancholy, repeated puu-peee, etc.
Land - (yes others contributed) a melancholy series of 4 short whistles, last lower in pitch
SPOTTED WOOD QUAIL
Chalif - Loud; a low-high-low combination: grouuw-chow-lo or hrook-chou-low, repeated
Eisenmann - An excited, ringing whipa-whipee'o, repeated musical
RUFUS AND WHITE WREN
Chalif - a repetitious series beginning and ending with a higher note: twee-chachalahlahlahlahlahlah-twee
Eisenmann - A rhythmic series of hooting notes starting and ending with a higher-pitched whit
Okay, remember the exercise of a car on cobblestones. Exchange papers with someone and see what they wrote.
After all this, I was not any closer to discovering and identifying my morning bird. So I decided science before sleeping in and the next morning I climbed reluctantly out of bed and with a cup of coffee in hand and binoculars around my neck, I set out to find that less attractive, boring, repetitive, double tooting voice. I had only to go down the hill to the end of the street and around the corner on the next block. There, sitting at the end of a driveway, sat a small five year old Mexican boy playing with little hot wheel trucks in the dirt and in his mouth, a whistle, double tooting away as he played, waiting to be taken to school.
Oh, what about Blake? He had a voice published for one of the 1038 bird in the book. Just the one, but I'll bet Blake was very proud and told all his friends. Way to go Blake.
