Sing a Song of Sixpence with a Common Raven, an American Crow, a Common Grackle, a Red-winged Blackbird, a Brewer’s Blackbird, and a European Starling. This classic song and nursery rhyme, accompanied by an animation from the team at BirdNote, provides bird call examples from a few common North American black birds.
Sing along and listen to the calls, then see if you can recognize them when you’re out in the wild.
And if you’d like to hear more from and about each of these birds, then click on their names in the paragraph above. ⬆️ Each link leads to a two-minute BirdNote podcast episode about that bird.
Then check out BirdNote.org’s Resources for Educators, which include lessons developed by educators, a Sights & Sounds gallery, and more than 1,600 podcast episodes.
“Ranging from metallic hisses to electronic yodels, sounds of grackles may not be music to our ears—but they have their own rough beauty, a distinctive, primal harshness. Grackle songs evolved to carry through their nesting habitats — dense marshes and brushy landscapes — where more lyrical notes and phrases wouldn’t carry well. However strange they may sound, they know how to make themselves heard.”
Watch these wonderful bird sound videos next on TKSST:
• A Short History of the Nightingale, animated
• The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bird Song Hero
• How do birds learn to sing?
• Fløjteløs / Whistleless by Siri Melchior
• The surprising alarm-like call of the world’s loudest bird
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