{"id":9605,"date":"2015-05-18T03:53:58","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T10:53:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=9605"},"modified":"2015-04-11T07:27:39","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T14:27:39","slug":"the-bird-is-nothing-but-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/18\/the-bird-is-nothing-but-song\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bird Is Nothing But Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s that time of year, when the long-awaited blush of green in the treetops starts to drive the warbler watchers wacky.<\/p>\n

I can’t count the number of times during this Biggest Week that I’ve heard the old complaint: Why do all these warbler-colored, warbler-sized, warbler-shaped\u00a0leaves have to come out just when\u00a0the birds arrive? Just a few weeks ago, we couldn’t wait for the skeletal twigs of winter to burst their buds, and now, what we wouldn’t give for a bare branch or two up there where all that tantalizing buzzing and trilling is going on. If only the blasted habitat wouldn’t get in the way!<\/p>\n

Plus \u00e7a change….<\/em><\/p>\n

F\u00e9lix de Azara, who celebrates his 169th birthday today (how time flies!), experienced similar frustrations in the twenty years he spent wandering South America.<\/p>\n

\"Sedge<\/a><\/p>\n

One little Paraguayan bird in particular gave Azara fits<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It keeps to cover in tall vegetation, where it hides, coming out only when you are about to step on it; then it flies away a hundred yards or so, and if you chase after it, you’re amazed to find that it has already escaped to an even greater distance…. It is a restless, shy bird.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Azara says — good Euro-colonialist that he was — that<\/p>\n

this bird has no name of its own, and I have given it the name of “todo-vox,” because of its song.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hardly there in the flesh, as it darts from one reedy covert to the next, the bird is “all song,” nothing but voice — like all those disembodied chips and chirps raining down on us from the trees right now.<\/p>\n

[Azara’s sneaky brown bird was a sedge wren,\u00a0<\/em>Cistothorus platensis polyglottus.]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s that time of year, when the long-awaited blush of green in the treetops starts to drive the warbler watchers wacky. I can’t count the number of times during this Biggest Week that I’ve heard the old complaint: Why do all these warbler-colored, warbler-sized, warbler-shaped\u00a0leaves have to come out just when\u00a0the birds arrive? Just a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Bird Is Nothing But Song”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[445,443,442,444,446,221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9605"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9605"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9946,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9605\/revisions\/9946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}