United States or Wallis and Futuna ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His way of doing this was to take his position on the tallest tree in the vicinity, and fill the serene morning air with his cry of distress, a two-note utterance, with a pathetic inflection which could not fail to arouse the sympathy of all who heard it. It was not excited or angry, but it proclaimed that here was distress and danger, and it had the effect of making me ashamed of annoying him.
When a bird, without visible provocation, suddenly burst out with this loud two-note call, instantly every feathered individual was on the alert, sprang to arms, as it were. Blue jays joined in, robins hurried to the tops of the tallest trees and added their excited notes, with jerking wings and tail, and at the second or third repetition the whole party precipitated itself as one bird upon what?
Beside the well-known squawk, which Thoreau aptly calls "the brazen trump of the impatient jay," the shouts and calls and war-cries of the bird can hardly be numbered, and I have no doubt each has its definite meaning. More rarely may be heard a clear and musical two-note cry, sounding like "ke-lo! ke-lo!"
In a moment the uneasy bird slipped into her old place, but, apparently too restless to stay, was out again in a few seconds, when she stood up in the nest and began calling, a loud but musical two-note call, the second tone a third higher than the first, and different from anything I had heard from her before.
At three places where the singer uses one or the other of the tones foreign to the pentatonic scale, he makes half-step progressions. In the fourth line of the song we find the single instance in these records, where the performer takes an upward glissando. It is on the two-note embellishment F-natural G-flat shown in the last measure of that line.
He replied to me, and fluttered his wings slightly, yet he soon became restless, as usual. He did not fly, however, and he answered louder than he had done previously, but I found that my call must be just right to elicit a response. I might whistle all day and he would pay no attention, till I uttered a two-note call, the second note a third above the first and the two slurred together.
We saw the strange pair several times in the woods, and then one day, as I sat at my window trying to write, I heard a new cry, and saw a strange bird fly to the fence. He was very restless, ran along the top board, then flew to another fence, scrambled along a few feet, raising and lowering his tail, and all the time uttering a husky two-note baby-cry.
High above the top of the rocks, in the clear thin air of the mountain, a flock of swallows wheeled and sported, uttering an unfamiliar two-note call; butterflies fluttered irresolute, looking frivolous enough in the presence of the eternal hills; gauzy-winged dragonflies zigzagged to and fro, their intense blue gleaming in the sun.
One morning, attracted by the shimmering floor of jewel which Lake Champlain presented under the morning sun, I sat looking out over my neighbor's cornfield, where goldfinch babies were filling the air with their quaint little two-note cries, absorbed in the lovely view, when suddenly I heard a whir of wings and looked up to see a hummer flying about near the nest where madam was sitting.
What he beheld was an under-keeper standing close by and blowing upon a two-note pea-whistle till there seemed some danger that he would burst his cheeks, or a blood-vessel, on the spot, and far up the field three wandering pheasants racing back to the covert, as they thought, for very life; but, as a matter of fact and you shall see it was to very death.
Word Of The Day