Nature News from RSPB Scotland

How to Listen to Birds Episode 6

• RSPB Scotland

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In the last of our miniseries on birdsong Stephen is squeezing in a few moorland highlights before heading back to Wood of Cree for a rainy visit. 

Guided again by Crystal Maw he's listening to a mournful thrush and hearing about the bizarre life cycle of a Cuckoo.

Let us know what you want to hear about in the podcast podcast.scotland@RSPB.org.uk 

And don't forget to leave us a review wherever you listen to the pod.

Stephen Magee:

Hello, I'm Stephen Magee and this is episode 6 of how to Listen to Birds. It's incredible the range there is and you're always learning every single year and it's great fun. Some people describe it as a laughing bandit. So it was. Ha ha, ha, ha, ha, ha ha. I'll shoot you. Some people describe it as a laughing bandit.

Crystal Maw:

So it was ha ha, ha, ha, ha ha ha. I shoot you. It's definitely in their advantage to rise above the rest. You don't want to be a one trick pony. It's got a bigger back catalogue than Taylor Swift.

Stephen Magee:

This is how to Listen to Birds. Welcome to episode six. As I speak to you, I am currently lying down in a field up a hill. I have a view of Edinburgh in front of me. For this episode I wanted to fill in a wee blank that I feel like we've had something missing from the podcast, and that's some upland bird sounds. This is going to be the last episode of how to Listen to Birds, certainly for now. It doesn't mean the podcast is going away. The podcast will be back in some form, but this will be the last one of this little mini-series focused on birdsong.

Stephen Magee:

And, yeah, we somehow have managed to miss out on plenty of things, so I thought I'd come up here this morning. I have to say it is extremely windy, so it has been a bit of a challenge, but I've got a few things. The main thing that I wanted to get for you because I didn't want to do a whole podcast on birdsong and miss them out was Skylark. So this is a rotten day for recording Skylarks because it's quite late in the season it's July now and it's very windy and the Skylarks seem to pick the ridge lengths to sing on, which is the worst place to hear them in the wind, but I did manage to get under a couple. So even with all that wind noise getting in the way, it's an amazing sound, isn't it? It's a constant bubbling and all the other noises Very much the soundtrack of being anywhere up on moorland or high ground in the spring and the summer. Just absolutely lovely.

Stephen Magee:

But that is not all. Just there, bang on cue was a meadow pipit and I did manage to get a few meadow pippets altogether. So for me it's a bird song that goes along with Skylark. Quite often they're in the same places at the same time. But the Meadow Pipits, that descending bang bang, bang, bang, bang, bang bang thing, quite often they do it when they're doing that kind of parachuting display flight. So it actually goes with the flight. You know they're dropping in tones. They drop down Not as spectacular a showy as the Skylark, but pretty decent in its own right.

Stephen Magee:

And then the other thing I came across, which for anybody who's spent any time in Moorland in Scotland I was coming across a patch of heather and there was a creaking, iron-hingey, rusty gate kind of a noise. There's a stone chat and they are noisy guys. I know that about it. Really, pretty little bird like the males a lot of brown in them, but also reds and whites and blacks, and really noticeable when they're chatting away. That was good to get.

Stephen Magee:

So, yes, apologies for the slightly scrubby, windy recordings, but at least it means that we have got some uplandy, moorlandy stuff into this podcast. However, the majority of this podcast is not from a windy moor, it is from Wood of Cree and if you listen to episode five you'll know that Wood of Cree is an amazing place down in Dumfries and Galloway, galloway. So in the last episode I had been out with Crystal Maw, who knows the patch really well, listened out for some of the really specialist birds that you get down there wood warbler, pied fly catcher, red start. But this episode, same trip, but maybe some of the things that you might hear in all kinds of different kind of woodland, some of the less specialist commoner species. So I will be back after our little trip to the wood of Cree for a bit of housekeeping, clear a few things up, but until then it's off to a rainy Dumfries and Galloway.

Stephen Magee:

So the weather forecast for Wood of Cree was for a beautiful, dry, windless, still morning in early May, which would be a perfect time to hear the dawn chorus. It is still and windless. I am with Crystal Maw, who knows this patch really well. It hasn't quite delivered on the weather front. It is a little bit rainy. It's still a beautiful place though. So we'll see. It's kind of coming and going rain wise, which which means, you know, recording some of this audio may be a bit of a challenge. But I have brought an umbrella. Well, I say I brought an umbrella. I had to rush to the supermarket last night and buy, you know, actually quite a fancy see-through umbrella, which hopefully will mean that we can get some birdsong audio as well as everything else. But shall we see how we get on?

Stephen Magee:

yes, good so over the sound of the rain. There was a little kind of shuffley, almost metallic guy there. What was that?

Crystal Maw:

There are metallic bits incorporated into the blackcap sound. So they'll click and they'll sound jingly and then they'll be singing like a chatty robin and then they'll be jingling again. So it's a real mixture and the pitch goes quite a range and then they'll click at you and skit you and then they'll start singing again. So it's really variable, really mixed, what the black cap does. So you're probably hearing the little metallic jingles that it's incorporating into its song.

Stephen Magee:

So there's a very thin, to me sounding like high-pitched bee, bee, bee, bee, bee, bee, bee, bee noise. What's that?

Crystal Maw:

It's a blue tit, right, okay, it's a good one because you'll get it in gardens, you'll get it in scrub, hedgerows, woodland, parkland.

Stephen Magee:

It's a really ubiquitous bird, so you're bound to hear it and I think that's interesting to me as somebody who's beginning to feel the way with birdsong a bit right, because the noise I hear blue tits making my garden is not largely that noise. The noise I hear blue tits make in my garden is much more intense, kind of like quite chattery kind of, you know, almost like buzzing kind of a noise. It's not melodic like that, yeah. So one of the things I try to get in this podcast right is like why are birds making different noises at different times? So why is a blue tit making that noise just now? What's that noise doing?

Crystal Maw:

that's its song. So that's it saying I'm on a territory that's really good. It's got lots of food. I'm on the lookout for a female right.

Stephen Magee:

Come on, ladies come on, come on, ladies, and that and that, the more intense noise that I hear when they're maybe in a tree near me or something. Is that more like a contact call or an alarm call or something like that, the kind of like the more buzzy one, or do they just have like a whole bunch of different songs?

Crystal Maw:

They do. They're quite variable. The blue tits, all the tits. They have. Lots of chips and cheeps and teeps yeah, they're all over the place. Lots of chips and cheeps and teats yeah, they're all over the place. However, you can usually say this is it singing? This is its alarm call, it's being really angry, it's buzzing at you saying you're in my space, I don't like you here, go away. Um, quite often that'll be back to back with its song and then sometimes you'll get little shorter spurts of contact calls, or it's just happy to be on a bird feeder and it's just chipping away and occasionally buzzing at another bird sits too near the peanut, so it's really mixed. So, yeah, you'll get a mixture of your song, your contact calls and your alarm buzzes, and you can usually tell by how aggressive they sing or buzz at you what they're feeling.

Stephen Magee:

Kind of flutey and, to me, a bit kind of resigned. Yeah, you know, kind of like it's raining again Minor key quite melancholy, minor key melancholy. So that is. That's a mistle thrush, mistle thrush Big thrush, the UK's biggest thrush.

Crystal Maw:

It used to be called Stormcock, because they really like singing in stormy weather or after high winds and rain.

Stephen Magee:

Tops of trees and compared to a song thrush it is less explosive than kind of. You know. Song thrush is kind of like all the car alarms in the street going off at one time. You know, it's like all those different combinations, it's. It's quite. I guess it's repetitive, but it does.

Crystal Maw:

It really cuts through it's quite loud, yeah, not, as you say, not explosive, but loud, cuts through. It's quite hesitant and repetitive. It's like they're starting to sing a song a really sad and then they forget the words and they have to start again. They do that quite often, over and over again.

Stephen Magee:

Are you saying it's kind of like an end of the night karaoke vibe? It's kind of like we're doing it all and then we're doing country roads again.

Crystal Maw:

Yeah, early morning after the night before still singing away. I find them quite beautiful. When I hear them cutting through, they make me smile for some reason.

Stephen Magee:

No, I like it and I don't think it should feel, you know, overshadowed by the song. First, just because it's a bit more showy. Yeah, even I know that that boop-boop-boop-boop is a cuckoo. Yeah, for people who don't know the life cycle of the cuckoo, right, it is absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, so they will come here from Africa, right, where they spend their winters, find a mate by doing that what we were just hearing poo poo, poo poo. Does the female sound the same?

Crystal Maw:

No, they sound a little bit like grunting pigs.

Stephen Magee:

Right, so boop boop, boop boop.

Crystal Maw:

That was a very good impression.

Stephen Magee:

And then they'll breed. The female will then lay her egg in the nest of another species like some little thing, like a meadow pipette or like a reed warbler, depending where they are, and then they just sling their hook. They're done right.

Stephen Magee:

Yeah, just go and enjoy life and whatever that other little species quite often like much, much smaller bird, because like a cuckoo is like quite a decent sized bird, you know, somewhere in between like a blackbird and a wood pigeon. I guess it's like a muckle bird compared to a reed warbler or a meadow pipit and they will raise this increasingly enormous chick which has also got rid of the eggs.

Crystal Maw:

Yeah, the poor other fledglings. As soon as the cuckoo chick hatches like the very first hour probably it chucks out all its nestlings, its fellow nestlings, so it's the only one left that gets fed by this adult host bird.

Stephen Magee:

I mean, I know there's no way to know this, because you can't get in the head of a middle paper or a reedler in these situations, but the only way I've ever been able to explain it to myself is that they are so possessed with the need to raise a chick, with the urge to raise a chick, and all the hormones and everything else that involves, that they just don't see the reality of what they're doing, that they're blinded to it.

Crystal Maw:

Yeah, there is a bit of an arms race between the cuckoo and their host species, the cuckoo and their host species. So there's that they've got to get past a certain point the cuckoos of deception before the host species get taken in. So quite often you'll find it's been studied a lot and cuckoos you know they'll return back to their the same spot year after year. They're quite long-lived species. You might be hearing the same cuckoo you know.

Crystal Maw:

If you heard it 10 years ago in a woodland near you, it might very well be the same cuckoo individual that you're hearing 10 years later. So they'll come back to the same areas and they'll choose the same species of bird to cook hold and you'll find that they mimic the eggs they're laying, are mimicking the birds, the nests, sorry, the eggs of the birds they're laying their eggs in. So a cuckoo who's being hosted by a reed warbler, then their egg will look like a reed warbler's egg medipipets. The cuckoo egg will look a bit more like a medipipet egg and that will confuse the host bird and they'll start accepting it. And then by the time they get to hatching stage and the young cuckoo has kicked out all its nest mates. It's so ingrained in the biology of the bird to feed this hungry mouth.

Stephen Magee:

Whatever, whatever mouth no matter how enormous it is.

Crystal Maw:

Yeah, yeah um, they'll just, they'll just keep feeding it, caterpillars feeding it, feeding it, feeding it until it's you know the size of Jabba the Hutt and sitting in this nest, uh, just demanding food without doing any work on its own. So, yeah, it's ingrained in their biology to just once they got to that hatched stage. Then it's just accepted by the bird. Yes, it's insane.

Stephen Magee:

It is Thank you. So earlier on we heard a mistle thrush and we were talking about how much we enjoyed like it's kind of quite restrained, kind of, you know, melodic, slightly mournful tone, and we had mentioned song thrush in that conversation. So there's a song thrush here it is.

Stephen Magee:

I cannot think of any other phrase. It's just throwing shapes. You know what I mean. It's like all these different phrases, like they're tonally quite different. Some of them are like really harsh, some of them are melodic, some of them are high. It's got low stuff going on as well, and surely this is an unnecessarily complex song they definitely throw the kitchen sink at it, don't they?

Crystal Maw:

so they they, yeah, and they're good mimics as well. So I've got one near my house, that, uh, because I have red kites near my house, the song thrush. Since february it's been calling like a red kite and they just whatever they hear, they just shove a bit of that into their repetitive repertoire. So they'll do two, three, four repeats of a phrase and then they'll think, oh, I'll just, I'll just put in a red kite here and they'll do you know three or four of that, and then they'll put in something else. Maybe they'll make up their own mixture and put that in. So yeah, they're really putting everything into it and they're just trying to be as bold and as varied as they can be, I think, just trying to impress with as many things they've learned as possible, do you think?

Stephen Magee:

they borrow like bars off each other.

Crystal Maw:

Oh, definitely, yeah, yeah, do you think like, like?

Stephen Magee:

bars off each other. Oh, definitely, yeah, yeah. To think like if one song thrush's like, I like that.

Crystal Maw:

I'll take that. Yeah, it'll lick it, yeah, yeah, yeah, and it'll maybe change it a little bit and Put their own spin on it. Yeah and then the next one will do the same and you end up with this kind of ever-evolving sound that the song thrush are incorporating and we're we pushing at the limits of my taxonomic knowledge.

Stephen Magee:

Right so like mistle thrushes and song thrushes are both thrushes. Right like blackbirds, field fares, red wings and wax wings.

Crystal Maw:

No wax wings aren't right.

Stephen Magee:

Okay, so they just hang out with thrushes, but they're not a thrush, right? Okay? So two birds, mistle Thrush and Song thrush that to look at are quite similar.

Crystal Maw:

Okay.

Stephen Magee:

Mistle Thrush is bigger, right Sound totally different.

Crystal Maw:

Yeah, totally so. The Mistle Thrush sounds a bit more like a blackbird. I think yeah, yeah, yeah I actually find them quite difficult to tell apart. The mistle thrush and blackbird, right, but the missile thrush is more hesitant, it's definitely more melancholic than the bold songthrush. So, yeah, they look similar, I guess. Mistle thrush, they hold themselves more upright, they've got a big pot belly, as you say. They're bigger birds upright, they've got a big pot belly, as you say. The bigger birds, uh they. They overall look more gray or silvery, whereas the song thrush is very warm toned.

Crystal Maw:

Yeah, it's got a bit of kind of orangey ready hue, especially under its wings, not as much as the red wing, but, um yeah, just generally a bit warmer than the mistle thrush.

Stephen Magee:

So but they they do look similar but the songs are completely different I think there is a strong whiff with the song first for me, of the guy up the back of the bus who's got like a bee in his bonnet about. Like you know, bill gates has put, like you know, chips in like our bloodstreams and they make us need to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and want to buy computers and stuff. It's got a slight tinfoil hat feel to it, it's intensity, it's just insistency, it's intensity.

Crystal Maw:

But they can't think for themselves. I've just heard one trying to chief chaff there, so they're just repeating what other people are saying.

Stephen Magee:

In that case, they're a lot like the guy on the back of the bus.

Stephen Magee:

He's just like. I heard this on YouTube, it must be true, exactly. Yeah, I in retrospect perhaps am being a bit harsh on song thrushes there. I'm not saying they're tinfoil hat guys themselves, I'm just saying they're kind of intense and I think even if they were here to defend themselves they would probably admit that.

Stephen Magee:

Anyway, just to, as we have done with these other episodes, recap the birds that we heard when we were down there at Wood of Cree First thing that we came across in the rain was a black cap, and then one of the many noises that a blue tit can make that I didn't realise was a blue tit. Then a kind of slightly resigned, mournful sound of a mistle thrush. Quite faint, but definitely be a cuckoo and the full bore intensity of song thrush to finish it all off. So yes, as I said, this will be the last of the how to listen to birds, certainly for now. Might give it a go again next season.

Stephen Magee:

Do please let me know what you think of the podcast, what you, what direction you'd like it to take, whether you'd like more stuff on birdsong or you'd like more stuff on anything else. The easiest way to get in touch with us is to drop us an email, podcastscotlandrspborguk, or leave us a review on any of the many platforms where you can get this podcast Spotify, apple Podcasts, anywhere else you happen to get them. There'll be a brief pause, I suspect in podcasts where we have a think about what to do next. But it's been. I've really enjoyed doing these birdsong ones. I hope they've been of some use and until we speak again, thanks for listening and goodbye.