About

In one of my earliest memories, I slowly woke up in my crib feeling warm sunshine and soft air wafting through the open window and hearing the sweet melody of a bird. Although I did not hear that song again for almost 50 years, awaking to hear the same music so many years later instantly brought back that singular moment of complete comfort. I suspect that this bird is not particularly rare; I probably did not hear it for so long because I spent much of my life moving to other counties and states, and living in closed environments. Recently, I heard it again!

I have no idea what the bird is, but I am inviting you to join in my search. I suppose I could just go to one of the excellent web sites I reference on this blog, and play all the recorded calls, but what fun is that? I also now have many birds that I just like anyway, knowing they are not “The One”.

You should know that ornithology is not my field, and I am certainly not claiming expertise here, just a different way to learn. Below is an expanding group of birds that I investigate by drawing them, capturing their calls in musical notation, and finally sharing them by placing my “Avian Note Art” on gift items in my on-line shop Watershed Wildlife Designs (watershedwildlifedesigns.com).

The habitat and music of each bird is accompanied below by my drawings and links to sources of their recorded calls. The musical notation I display on my designs I adapted from The Fieldbook of Wild Birds and Their Music, written by F. Schuyler Mathews, G.P. Putman’s Sons, New York, 1904; or created using SoundCloud software to analyze audio files from the Cornell Ornithology web site (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/ ).

Fabulous web sites abound; and many have extensive libraries of bird songs and calls.  (Unless otherwise noted, information for this blog can be found on the Cornell site, All about Birds, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/ . )  Consequently, my description of each bird here is only cursory for basic identification purposes, but I do hope to provide a cross reference bank of links to established recordings for each particular bird so that you do not have to search through each library to find a specific bird. If you find addition recordings or pertinent acoustic information, please feel free to provide updates here.