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GREG BUDNEY: On many an occasion I've been camping in the Adirondacks and one of my favorite periods is right at dusk when the lake becomes absolutely glass-like. The sun is setting, but you can still see the silhouettes of trees, all these conical spires. Beautiful reflection on the water with the last few bits of sunlight, and then you hear the wail of a loon.
[WAILING]
You'll hear one individual of the pair give this long, mournful wail. Which is essentially saying, I'm here, where are you? Generally moments later, you'll hear the response from the other member of the pair giving its wail saying, I'm over here.
[WAILING]
Loons are active at night. You can be out in a beautiful Adirondack lake after dark, or a northern Minnesota lake, and this is one of the characteristic, evocative sounds you're going to hear from that area. Something that will stick with you for the rest of your life.
[WAILING]
It just punctuates the fall of night, and really sets the mood for what follows. The solitude, the peacefulness. It's all wrapped up in that one vocalization.
[WAILING]
LAURA ERICKSON: I get a lot of phone calls, and e-mails, and letters from people who woke up in the middle of the night thinking something terrible was invading their campground when they suddenly were hearing barred owls.
[OWL CALL]
They're often doing that because they're hearing another pair or individual barred owl on an established territory, and that's when the pair starts really revving up and making those territorial calls.
[OWL CALL]
One night I was being totally quiet, just walking along this road, and in flew two barred owls. There was a full moon behind them, and you could actually see their eyes as they were calling, and it was just magical.
[OWL CALL]
GREG BUDNEY: I was up on this ridge out in sagebrush habitat, south of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. The sun hadn't been up very long, maybe a half an hour. And there were nighthawks up in the air. Several males displaying.
[HAWK CALL]
The calling and booming are typically heard at dawn and early evening. The nasal [INAUDIBLE] is call that is given in flight, and then you hear what sounds like a truck roaring by that suddenly just disappears. And that's a mechanical sound produced as the bird goes into a dive, air rushes through the primary feathers, and as it comes out of the dive the rushing of air ceases and the boom suddenly stops.
[HAWK CALL]
The common nighthawk is a really graceful, aerodynamic bird. It has a fairly slender, tapered body. A very small bill, almost inconspicuous. Long, tapered wings with white blazes right in the bend of the wing, or the wrist of the wing. So as they fly in good light conditions, you see these blazes of white flash as the wings are raised and lowered.
[HAWK CALL]
What I hadn't experienced up to that point was the males coming down, diving within a meter of the ground. Within three feet of the surface. What had been a distant experience, spectacular experience hearing them call and watching them chasing one another, actually becoming a very intimate experience within meters of where I was standing. It's a really fascinating display to watch.
[HAWK CALL]
MARTHA FISCHER: So we went way far north to Bathurst Island, the Canadian high arctic where the landscape is totally tundra, wide open. Beautiful, beautiful place. The terrain is just huge. So we've been walking for miles. We were pretty tired, and it was about time to hear a bird. I was ready.
[BIRD CALL]
And this particular bird, this was a white-rumped sandpiper we were after. They're just amazing in the display that they do. They fly close to the ground and then all of the sudden take a sharp turn and go skyward. And right at the apex, right when they get really high, they hover, and they'll go into this vocalization that sounds very insect-like.
[BIRD CALL]
What these males were doing, they were doing this display showing females that here I am, and showing other males that don't come across this imaginary line that divides our two territories. The only place you'll get this vocalization is on their breeding ground, so it was a real thrill to actually hear this vocalization. I'd never heard it before, so it was really neat. It was just the last thing that I would expect to hear from a bird.
[BIRD CALL]
GREG BUDNEY: The northern cardinal, for many of us, is that first blaze of color after a long winter. They begin to sing in the late winter, early spring. And you see that male cardinal dashing across your yard to take up a post and singing its brilliant whistled song.
[CARDINAL CALL]
The song of the cardinal is actually fairly simple. It's a series of whistle syllables. Usually each song is comprised of one to two, sometimes three syllable types.
[CARDINAL CALL]
One component of a cardinal song that often goes overlooked, but if you listen carefully, you can actually hear is a churr or curring, and it occurs at the end of the song. And it's much softer than the actual whistled notes. And they don't always give it.
[CARDINAL CALL]
A female northern cardinal is as adept as a male at singing. Often this goes overlooked because we assume it's only the males that sing. But if you listen carefully, if you watch, you may actually see and hear a female singing.
[CARDINAL CALL]
Humans use their voice box to produce sound. We're only able to produce one sound at a time. Birds use another type of organ called the syrinx, and it's located right where the two bronchial tubes come up from each lung. It's a paired structure. It has two sides to it that are equivalent in their ability to generate sound. And a bird actually can produce one sound in the left side and another independent sound on the right side.
When a cardinal sings a beautiful upward sweeped whistle, it's actually using the left side to produce the lower portion of that whistle and without any obvious break to us as human beings it produces the higher pitched portion of that whistle with the right side. Just amazing physiology involved in sound production.
[CARDINAL CALL]
To see a flash of red and then these fantastic bursts of clear whistled song, it's one of those invigorating things that signals the transition from late winter into early spring.
[CARDINAL CALL]
MARTHA FISCHER: So imagine this is like a tropical paradise to me. Gorgeous blue sky, ocean for as far as you can see, blue as can be. It's just gorgeous, and here are these beautiful black birds with these red throat pouches doing these displays on an island in the Dry Tortugas. It just makes for this incredibly beautiful experience.
[BIRD CALL]
What we're hearing is the tapping noise of a male frigate bird displaying in front of females. And what he does he has a red throat pouch that he can inflate and he can make a drumming sound with it. So you hear the clapping of his bill and you also hear the drumming that's coming out of that pouch.
[BIRD CALL]
The males were especially animated when a female would come soaring overhead. And imagine these are very large birds and they were just hanging in the wind. And here'd be a male perched on the dead mangrove and he just puts his all into making this pouch big and red, and the drums it, clatters it, just showing her I'm the best.
[BIRD CALL]
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Greg Budney, Laura Erickson and Martha Fischer share their firstperson encounters with six of the bird world's most fascinating flyers-and their remarkable vocalizations.
