no.238 | Dawn Chorus on San Juan Island
PSO goes on a bird walk in Friday Harbor with Dr. Matthias Leu
Many songbirds learn their songs from their fathers. Along the way, these birds incorporate local dialects and sounds from their environment. The song is plastic until finally solidified upon iteration. I learned this on a bird walk (where one devotes attention to birds, often with someone with avian expertise) with Dr. Matthias Leu in the early morning hours of a summer day in Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands.
As a family, we try to meet with my wife’s sister’s family each year for a summer holiday. My brother-in-law, Jon Allen, an Associate Professor of Biology at William and Mary College, studies intertidal invertebrates. This means his lab is always proximal to a beach. For years, this meant Maine. In recent years, we have also visited them on the West Coast at the University of Washington’s storied Friday Harbor Labs in the San Juan Islands.
This year, I proposed a project to UW’s Whitely Center and was chosen to be a Whitely Scholar, meaning I could make art there without feeling weird. It also provided an excellent pretext to talk and collaborate with the scientists.
Jon co-teaches a class at FHL with ecologist and bird expert Dr. Matthias Leu, who graciously led me on an early bird walk through the Fire Trail, which is a two-mile coastal path that winds its way through forested cathedrals, tall grasses, and gorgeous high rocky shoreline views.
It was amazing to listen to the cacophony of birds, hear stories of the creatures that make them, and learn all about where they live. We heard more than we saw, but along the way, Matthias looked up the birds on his phone to show me pictures, which I dutifully photographed with varying success.
I held my field recorder in one hand and my camera in the other. You can hear the clicks of the shutter. This is a very short excerpt from an over 2-hour walk. I combined the recording of Matthias and the birds with an earlier improvisation I made on the Fire Trail, editing it to accommodate the bird sounds.
Here is just the audio of our walk without the guitar:
The image for PSO no. 238 was taken at the place we were standing at the beginning of the piece. I combined the image of a spectrograph of the field recording generated by the free Raven Lite software provided by the Cornell Ornithology Lab online.
Here is a partial list of birds we heard:
Swainson's Thrush
Pacific-slope Flycatcher
Pine Siskin
Red Crossbill
Song Sparrow (California Coast)
Spotted Towhee
Brown Headed Cowbird
Chestnut-backed Chickadee
Red Breasted Nuthatch
Purple Finch (Pacific)
European Starling
Cedar Waxwing
House Wren (Brown Throated)
Pacific Wren
Brown Creeper
Bald Eagle
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Happy New Year and thanks for Listening + Looking.