How to Speak Bird: Songs vs. Calls: Understand What Birds Are Saying

Step outside at dawn in spring and you'll hear it — that big, layered, show-off chorus of birds announcing themselves to the entire neighborhood. Now step outside at noon in the dead of winter. Totally different vibe: terse little chirps, a sharp squeak, the dry rattle of a chickadee.

Both are bird sounds. But ornithologists draw a firm line between them. That spring chorus? Mostly song. The winter chatter? Mostly calls. And once you learn to tell them apart, you'll never hear a backyard the same way again.

So what makes a "song" a song?

A song is the long, complex, often genuinely musical stuff — and it's almost always about reproduction. In most temperate species it's the males doing the singing during breeding season, and they're multitasking: warning rival males to stay out of their territory, and advertising to females that they're healthy, fit, and ready to settle down.

A Song Sparrow's bright trill, a Wood Thrush's haunting flute-like phrase, the White-throated Sparrow whistling what birders cheerfully translate as "Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody" — those are songs.

Two things really set songs apart:

They're usually learned, not instinctive. In most species, young songbirds (the group scientists call oscines) listen to adult tutors during a sensitive window early in life and then practice and perfect their songs. Like a human baby learning to speak, their first attempts are unlikely to be perfect. Because birds listen and learn from the singing birds around them, some species can develop regional "dialects" which reflect where they live or learned their songs. Some bird species are able to learn new songs throughout their lives, while others can't. Bird songs, how they are learned, and how birds use them is the subject of many research studies and scientists are learning more all the time. 

They're often seasonal and usually gendered. In most temperate areas, you'll hear the most birdsong in the early spring and summer, and mostly from males. But this is highly species-dependent and is very different in tropical climates, where females are more likely to sing. Since songs are most often associated with breeding activities, it makes sense that they would be less frequently heard in non-breeding seasons.

Bird calls

Calls are shorter and simpler vocalizations than songs, used all year by males, females and juveniles. These short chips, chirps and tweets are largely innate. When you spend enough time watching and listening to birds, you may learn to differentiate several types of bird calls:

• Contact calls keep a pair or flock connected while they move through thick brush.
• Alarm calls flag predators — often with different sounds for different threats.
• Flight calls are short in-air notes; nocturnal migrants use them to stay in touch overhead in the dark.
• Begging calls are the relentless squawking of nestlings demanding to be fed. 

Scientists also study bird calls to understand how and what information they may transmit. For example, the Black-capped Chickadee's "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" may sounds like idle chatter. But researchers found that chickadees add more "dee" notes when the predator is more dangerous.  A nearby predator like an owl can warrant a startling number of dee notes, letting other birds know about a significant threat.

Where the tidy categories fall apart

Some birds — pigeons, gulls, hawks — don't really "sing" in the technical sense at all; they get by almost entirely on calls.  Some "songs" may seem like a series of calls (a Barred Owl hooting, for example) and some "calls" can be more complex (like some Common Raven vocalizations), so the distinction may seem a bit arbitrary.

Female bird song is also getting more attention from researchers and birdwatchers. Long assumed to be the quiet ones, females are now known to sing in loads of tropical species and a growing list of temperate ones. 

Birds also make other sounds that aren't produced by a bird's vocal organ, known as the syrinx:

• A woodpecker's drumming isn't made with its voice at all, but these birds can use their drumming to communicate with others. It may be why a woodpecker may drum on your rain gutters: such great, loud acoustics!
• A Wilson's Snipe's "winnowing" during courtship flights is created when air rushes through its tail feathers, not its throat.

Birds, it turns out, have a lot of ways to send a message.

Why this is actually useful in the field

Getting to know the songs and calls of individual bird species can improve your birding experience. 

IDs get easier. Lots of birds that look nearly identical sound nothing alike when they sing. This can really help identify those LBB (little brown birds) from each other. It's also the basis for Haikubox, the automatic bird song and call identifier. It does a lot of the hard ear-birding work for you so you can grab some binoculars and look for those special birds.

You learn to "read" the woods. A sudden eruption of alarm calls means something's up — a hawk overhead, a cat in the bushes, a person wandering too close to a nest. It can be illuminating to listen and understand what the birds are saying to each other.

Next time you're outside, try this

Don't just ask which bird is making that sound. Ask what kind of sound it is. Long, structured, repeated — a song? Or short, sharp, and functional — a call?

Do that for a while and something shifts. You stop hearing "pretty noise" and start hearing the actual content: birds holding conversations, drawing maps of their territory, sounding alarms, and writing love letters into the air all around you — all at the same time.

Happy listening.