One that got away

Binn Green 

Yesterday afternoon when I was fossicking about by Binn Green car park I kept hearing a bit of song that I wasn't sure about. There wasn't much of it, and what there was was intermittent and interrupted, much in the way that a mistle thrush song never quite seems to get going. The song was coming from somewhere in a bit of birch scrub further along the road but I couldn't pin down the singer. A couple of blackbirds chased each other across the trees and a dark shape, probably another blackbird, flitted between some bilberry bushes but I couldn't find the mystery singer.

At the time I concluded that it was probably a song thrush warming up then getting distracted before getting into full song. The warm up practice notes of some birds can be puzzling, one of our local robins will do a few blackcap calls before starting singing in the afternoon and there have been a couple of times at Barton Clough where it's taken half a minute before I could be sure which of the singing thrushes was cranking up the engine. And I had a head full of wood warbler so wasn't paying all that much attention anyway. So I concluded it was probably a song thrush.

Sometimes these things nag at me. When I was writing up the last post last night I was reviewing the songscape in my head and something didn't quite fit. And there was something about that dark shape flitting between bilberry bushes that wasn't quite. The song sounded like a bit like a fragment of song thrush song, sung slow and sad. Two loud call notes repeated then a pause then a slow few seconds of something more complex like somebody learning and practicing an unfamiliar bit of music concentrating on the notes not the tempo. Sometimes it would just be the call notes.

I'd given up on the puzzle and was idly browsing bird reports later on when I noticed somebody mention seeing ring ousels further up Holmfirth Road. I hadn't been hearing and not recognising a ring ousel song had I? I had no idea what they sounded like. I went onto the Xeno-Canto web site and looked up some ring ousel songs. The first one I heard wasn't like the song I'd been fretting about. The second one was, though. And the third. And the fourth.

In all probability I'd been hearing a ring ousel singing, hadn't paid enough attention to the unconscious observation that this was something different and didn't put enough effort into finding the singer. It happens, it's part of the game. Usually it'll be a fairly common bird and I'll realise what I hadn't been registering when I hear another one singing or calling a couple of hundred yards down the path.

So I dipped on a ring ousel. Ah well. Next time I'm up that way I almost certainly won't remember what its song sounds like but if I hear something unfamiliar I will remember to check that it isn't a ring ousel.