Night owl activities

[altivo]

Rained all day, sometimes quite hard. Still raining now.

Picked up a friend and drove to Crystal Lake this evening for an Audubon meeting, not something I normally do but they had a speaker from the Illinois Ornithological Society on "Birding by Ear" (identifying birds solely by the sounds they make) and I wanted to hear what he had to say. He was quite interesting, actually, and brought some recorded examples so he could talk about what to listen for, and what's harder and what's easier. He ended with a brief video from a nature show of an Australian Lyrebird imitating other birds, like a Kookaburra for instance, and then various man-made sounds, such as the shutter of a camera, the film rewinding, and loggers using chainsaws and handsaws. It was amazingly accurate.

The meeting was at a nature center I haven't been in before, and there were a lot of exhibits more or less aimed at school kids but I found the live animals interesting and even the mounted specimens were surprisingly diverse.

Drove home in fog and drizzle, slowly.

And I have to go to sleep...

Comments

[songcoyote.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, lyrebirds! I've seen films of them before imitating various sounds. They're pretty amazing.

Reminds me of a parrot I had a while back that would imitate the phone ringing, the click of it being picked up, and then me saying "Hello?" It was pretty disconcerting the first couple of times he did it!

Light and laughter,
SongCoyote

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep. I've heard the brown thrashers here imitating cell phone rings. Out in the middle of the pasture. Makes one wonder where the heck they heard it, but that was clearly what it was. Someone told me that starlings can do cell phones too.

The lyrebird's camera shutter and film winding sounds were absolutely perfect. The logging crew and chain saws were good too, but nowhere near loud enough. ;p

They had closeups of its beak and mouth while it was doing this, so you could see that there was no fakery. It was genuine.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I remember that video, the motordrive of a camera and the standard manual shutter camera :D The lyrebird also collects blue things to attract a mate :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Anything blue? How curious.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Apparantly it was to decorate his nest to attract a mate. The amazing mimicry was also to help attract a mate apparantly :) At least in the Males, the Females can do it as well but aren't as vocal.