The Song of the Black-Throated Blue Warbler

Video Transcript

"Hello. Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today, we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield. And, we're going to be talking about birding by ear. Now, we mentioned the Barred Owl as one we can actually sort of put words to the phrases of the, the call of the bird. In some of the small song birds, like the Black Throated Blue Warbler, for example, we can either liken the song to words that are familiar to us, or we can use other syllables that are fairly easy to remember and sound much like what the bird's singing. One of the calls of the Black Throated Blue Warbler is in fact likened to "I am lazy", or phonetically, it could be "draedreashree". The idea that is has a sort of husky, dreamy quality that in either case, whether you like the words "I am lazy" or "draedreashree", it still serves to recall that song so that when you hear these birds either on their breeding territories in the mountains of northern New England and western Massachusetts, or if you hear them in the migration, it should trigger the thought, "Ah ha, that's a Black Throated Blue Warbler.""