| Name of vocalization | Comment | Social context |
| Chick-a -dee | Made up of preliminary elements (A,B,C,X=unknown/unidentified) followed by zero or more D elements. Much variability in the elements appearing in the sound, the number of repetitions of the elements, and frequency and duration of the elements. Typically, the peak frequency of the (ABCX) elements decreases through the call. Exceptions are A* calls and some vocalizations that appear to be made completely of B elements (sometimes an X or A at the start) with upper frequency envelope U-shaped. Rough identification guide: A has higher maximum frequency than B or C and tends to have broader, asymmetric peak. B is symmetric, usually narrower than A. C is nearly triangular, not pure-toned. | Fairly close range interaction between members of the same flock or family group. Sometimes given in synchrony by multiple birds. Sometimes repeated D elements used as a warning about or scold for predator such as Accipiter sp. or feral cat. Compare these D* calls with the scold/warning of Carolina Wrens. |
| Fee-bee | Typically a 4-noted call/song, but there is certainly some variation in the pitches and duration of the notes as well as in the number of notes. A convenient abbreviation is the H(high)-L(low) notation. The typical "fee-bee fee-bay" call is then HLHL. There's some variation on this even within single flocks and individual birds around Cincinnati. | Usually heard in late-winter/spring, after winter flocks have begun to disperse. Sometimes 2 or more birds "counter sing", often using the same H-L variant song. |
| Gargle | A complex vocalization made up of pure tones, sounds with rapidly changing frequencies, sounds including different amounts of harmonics, as well as a variety of rasps and buzzes. | Generally in loose flocks or between two birds; sometimes at end of chick-a-dee-dee or long string of D's. These vocalizations seem to be associated with agression/dominance. |
| Other sounds | These include sounds made by birds in a family groups (especially with young birds), and birds near their nests. | Sometimes given by birds in a flock or in a family group with newly fledged birds. |
In a quick study of call variability I recorded the duration of "Dee" notes and interval between consecutive "dee" notes given by birds from three different locations: Tanglewood, Mount Airy Arboretum, and Farbach-Warner. These locations are certainly far enough apart that no birds from one have had recent contact with birds from any of the others. A one-way ANOVA testing for differences in "dee" duration across location produced a p-value less than 0.001. This suggests that there's something to look at. There's plenty of problems with this study. Are consecutive "dee" notes independent? Are their durations normally distributed? What about other variables: weather, other sounds, presence of conspecifics? Also, some of the "dee" elements I measured were part of extended strings of D's in a scold given by multiple birds while others were were part of a "normal" chick-a-dee (ABDDDDD) call.
Chickadees show considerable variation in the "combinatorial vocalizations" (gargle, chick-a-dee) --- enough to encode a lot of information. There is more variation in the 'fee-bee' call/song of the cach than I've seen reported for bcch.. While bcch's typically sing a single "fee-bee" (except, it seems, on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts), cach's have a more variable "fee-bee" sounds. S.T. Smith describes cach "song" as being of a variable number of alternating H and L notes and even the Robbins (Golden) fieldguide to birds describes cach song as "4 or 5" notes.
By February-March the winter flocks of cach start to break up and I find pairs of birds fairly isolated from other cach's. I've watched such pairs for extended periods without hearing them give a chick-a-dee call. Presumably these pairs are starting to establish and protect breeding territories.
So far, I have avoided extended visits or recording near nests. This means that many vocalizations discussed by Hailman-Ficken and Smith are under represented here. While cach's are considered cavity nesters, many of the nests I've enountered are not (strictly) in a cavity: broken ends of branches, under shelf fungi and other, more expsed locations are certainly used. (But perhaps I find the more exposed nests more easily?)
By June family groups with newly fledged birds are foraging together.
One can hear "begging" young, as well as collections
of birds giving synchronized "DDDD..." calls.
In such closely related species as cach and bcch it seems reasonable to guess that similar sounds may be used in similar ways, though I've yet to find convincing arguments that show any pair of vocalization are homologous. An alternative explanation might be based on adaptation of sounds to the physical properties of the environment (or to particular tasks such as spreading alarm without attracting attention). This could account for convergence. Still, the similarities mentioned in the table are an excellent starting point.
Rather that attempt to justify, complete, or expand the Hailman-Ficken
chart, I've set out to construct a preliminary catalog of the vocal repertoire
of the cach around Cincinnati, Ohio. This will be particularly interesting
to compare with S.T. Smith's thesis work (primarily done in Philadelphia)
because of the possibility of geographic variation within the species.
The goal is to look for differences rather than similarities in
the use of sound by chickadees.
Some sounds |
If you click on the sonograms you will either hear the sound or see an enlarged sonogram. If you want to see an enlarged sonogram you can (using Netscape) right click on the picture and choose "view image" from the menu. With Microsoft's product, I guess you need to save the picture and open it as a local file. |
People generally distinguish several different elements that appear
in a chick-a-dee call. For the call above the elements might be called
A,A,B,D,D,D,D,D, and D. There's considerable variation in the timing and
frequencies of each of these elements, both in the sounds made by one bird
and across individuals. 'A' elements tend to have their peak frequency
higher than either B or C elements; they have a broader top, and tend to
be slightly asymmetric. 'B' elements tend to have a shorter duration than
A, lower maximum frequency, and narrower peak. 'C' elements are not really
pure toned. They appear on a sonogram as a narrow isosceles triangular
envelope with "overtones" filling the interior. These elements --- especially
A --- seem to intergrade with other sounds in the cach's repertoire and
with each other, so there seems to be no way to actually define the different
element types. Several patterns and tendencies can be observed without
specifically identifying the elements. When they appear in a call that
ends with D*, the elements appear in increasing alphabetical order ---
B's after A's and C's after B's. Any of the elements may be omitted. Some
examples:
This call is essentially a chick-a-dee call, although the first two elements (call them X) may actually be intergrades from a "High See" type (High Zee) call to A elements. After these, the call is composed of: AACCDD, with no B elements present.
This call shows a bird giving High Tee's (A?) and then switching to High See's.
cach39.mp3 [2000_03_19] 
.
As S.T. Smith observed, the bird was stationary while giving these high see's. It had been
counter singing HLHL songs with a cach nearby, but had stopped this and simply sat on its perch.
Chick-a-dee calls are frequently used while other flock members are nearby. Calls that are simply repeated D's are sometimes given in the presence of predators. Several birds will call at the same time with their D's given nearly simultaneously. At other times, birds in a family group, including newly fledged birds will do the same thing. In this example, the D's reach higher frequencies that typical in a typical chick-a-dee call.
cach17.mp3
Finally, here is series of "D D D" notes given primarily by one bird.
It was in a small flock and started making calls after a cawr had been
making "scolding" noises for about 30 seconds. Eventually tuti, brcr, dowo,
and gcki also appeared and started making noise. Perhaps all the alarm
was in response to my presence, but I hadn't moved or made noise since
shortly after the wren started calling.
Using the new "phrase parsing" program I determined the duration of the "D" notes (blocksize=200, baseline=500) and the duration of the gaps between them for the "D" series shown in the figure below. The first 20 "D" notes were measured. Note duration had mean=0.0392 sec and std dev 0.0059 sec while gap duration had a mean of 0.0317 sec and standard deviation of 0.0045 sec.
A plot of duration of note vs. time since start of the series (including the 21st "D" omitted from analysis):
and duration of gap vs. duration of preceding note:
One possible effect that might be observed with this sort of measure is fatigue; if producing long strings of D's uses lots of energy, we might observe a slowing (or spread) of D's in a long series. I first saw this suggested by Marcel M. Lambrechts (1996).
S. T. Smith divided gargle calls into a number of classes based on the elements making up the call, describing them as a compound vocalization based on about 6 elements (t-slink, click-rasp, etc.). Probably some subdivision of this class is called for, although Smith's data doesn't show any significant difference in the use of her sub-classes in different social situations. Frequently a bird gives a series of nearly identical gargles before switching the pattern and making a different call.
Here are typical gargles from a Chickadee in Mt Airy Park, February 2006.
It is temping to think of gargles as combinatorial vocalizations (like Chick-a-dee-dee) in which calls are assembled as a string of elements chosen from a pool of possible elements. But I haven't seen much evidence of this. It may be simply due to my small sample size, but I haven't found elements from one gargle appearing in another gargle. The most frequent variation that a bird makes on a given gargle is to add or leave off a final syllable.
cach30.mp3 Note that this sounds like the second gargle in the composite recording below.
Here are two gargles given by the same bird from Tanglewood Lane (28 Jan 1999). The first is one of many similar gargles that were given shortly after the start of what appeared to be an antagonistic encounter with another cach, the second is one of many gargles given shortly after the other chickadee flew away. During the encounter, a third bird was nearby making 'chick-a-dee' calls.
| cach33.mp3 |
 | During encounter |
| cach34.mp3 |  | After encounter |
gargle2.mp3 is a composite of 5 different gargles given by cach at Tanglewood [2000-1-1e, 2000-1-2a, 2000-1-2b, 2000-1-2b,2000-1-2c]. It presents the gargles at full and then half speed.
Note that frequently a bird will repeat an entire gargle, so that they seem to be given in pairs.
Here's a sonogram showing gargles given by a single bird [2000_1_2b]. This bird gave two different gargle calls.
Note the the buzzy ending to the first type of gargle is "optional" in
that it doesn't occur in the gargle given around 62 seconds. This was
the last gargle of the first type, and was followed by partial and
then complete gargles of the second type. Both gargles were frequently
given in pairs.
from Mt Airy Arboretum, 4 March 2006 and,
from Mt Airy near Pine Ridge Lodge, 4 March 2006.
And here's an example of a variation on this basic scheme. This HLHLHL song is from Tanglewood in January 2006.
Other variants of the HLHL song occur virtually everywhere I've listened to Carolina Chickadees. Here's another HLHLH from Tanglewood in spring 2001. [2001-MD1-24] and a series of HLH [2001-MD1-07] from the same flock at about the same time. During spring 2001 at Tanglewood, HLH songs were more frequent than HLHL's by a factor of about 3.
Here are other variants of song that occured in the Tanglewood flock in spring 2001. MLHLH, MLHL, MLH, MLHL, and HLHLH, HLH. These are shown in this sonogram.
Other people have also reported geographic variation in the cach Fee-bee song. A regional survey (Ward 1966) reported other orderings than the "HLHL" pattern, including LHL, HLLH, and HMLL as typical of different regions.
A second bird flew from a nearby canopy, and perched low in the shrubs not far from the first bird. There followed a string of high Tee's and X*'s.
cach36.mp3
Then the first bird gave a full chick-a-dee and started making gargles, which were given (all nearly
identical) for about a minute:
The two birds flew off in the same direction.
Notes
1. This is interesting in the context of the ways in which other species of birds learn and perform their songs. Roughly speaking, some birds learn just one song while they are young and sing it for the rest of their life. An example is the Indigo Bunting. In other species birds don't learn songs at all --- the songs are innate and (presumably) genetically determined. An example is the Willow Flycatcher. Some species of birds sing a large variety of songs, either having learned them or by improvising, having learned them or their elements while young or later in life. Brown Thrasher, Carolina Wren, Song Sparrow have vocal repertoires of more than one song. The distinction between song birds that learn songs and those whose songs are innate seems correlates with many other characters, including the structure of the part of the brain that is thought to control song learning and performance. This distinction is between the oscine and suboscine passerines. In fact both cach and tuti seem to sing a number of different songs and switch between them wfile countersinging with nearby birds.
Hailman and Ficken's table of parid vocalization:
| Black-capped Chickadee (Ficken et.al. 1978) | Carolina Chickadee (S. T. Smith 1972) | Willow Tit (S. Haftorn 1993) | Mexican Chickadee (Ficken 1990) | Siberian Tit (S. Haftorn 1973) | Boreal Chickadee (McLaren 1976) |
| Fee-bee | Song | Song | Peeta-Peeta | Trryy | Rapid musical call |
| Faint Fee-bee | Faint song | Faint song | Soft trill | ||
| Gargle | T-slink, click-rasp, rasp-slink, tee-rasp | Gargle | Gargle | Pti-pyy, ptri-poi, tjillup | Trilled call, musical call |
| Chick-a-dee (ABCD) | Chick-a-dee (chip, tee,chick,dee) | Si-taa, Pja calls | Chick-a-dee (A,C,D) | Ti, pst, teae, pev, piv | Chickadee (chit, seep, chika, dee) |
| Broken dee | Broken dee | Pipae | Begging | Begging call | |
| Variable see (sexual see) | Variable see | Si-si-si | Variable see | Sisisi | Solicitation |
| Hiss-snarl | Hissing | Hiss | Hiss | Hiss | |
| Twitter (crackle) | Twittering | Stutter | |||
| Tseet | Tseet | Sie,sit,sit/staccato | Tseet | Dytt | Seep |
| High zee (alarm zee) | High see | Zi-zi-zi alarm | High zee | Sisisi | Sharp seep |
| Scream | Scream/squeal | Squeal |
