#and honestly every ep of TFM touches my soul but kristen's monologue in the bus stop ep was so utterly Alive and i keep thinking about it
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lizzieraindrops · 7 years ago
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Bird Quest Complete!
Hey pod nerds,
If you were wondering what bird is singing in the background of both @arsparadoxica Episode 16: Greenhouse and @thefarmeridian Episode 3: The Bus Stop, (because why wouldn’t you be wondering something like that?) I’m fairly certain I’ve identified it as the song of a Red-Breasted Flycatcher, Ficedula parva!
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Given nothing but the audio recording in the episodes and @mischaetc‘s weirdly specific yet vague intel that the track used “was recorded near the southwestern coast of Spain, sometime between 25-50 years ago,” I managed to track it down by going through a list of birds from the Andalucia Bird Society, using my amateur birder’s knowledge to pick likely bird family candidates, and finding audio of their songs. In the course of my quest to find what I’d started calling the Greenhouse/Bus Stop bird, I came across this incredible site called xeno-canto, where people all around the world upload thousands of recordings of bird songs in a collaborative audio archive. Bless the endless enthusiasm and exhaustive dedication of bird nerds, honestly.
I listened to probably a few hours’ worth of songs there, going through a bunch of recordings of plovers and curlews and thrushes and numerous unfamiliar small songbirds from a continent away. I was lucky to come across an unidentified background recording of the Greenhouse/Bus Stop bird in an entry for what would turn out to be its close relative, the Collared Flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis. Finally hearing an echo of that distinctive two-note song, even unnamed, was electrifying.
I ended up listening to recordings of all 31 species in the genus Ficedula listed on xeno-canto before narrowing it down to the Red-Breasted Flycatcher, but I was still unsure of the identification until I found two recordings of the songs of sub-adult males. Many of the songs I heard seemed more complicated than the two-note song we hear in the podcasts: most of them had a series of shorter single notes tacked onto the end of the repeated two-note run, like the song sung by the mature adult in this video. However, the songs of the younger birds seem to be occasionally simplified to just the two repeated notes, giving us the song of the Greenhouse/Bus Stop bird! I think whoever made the original recording happened to record the song of a juvenile instead of an adult.
If anyone finds a better song match, this bird nerd would dearly love to hear it, but until then, I’m calling this bird a Red-Breasted Flycatcher. Anyway, thanks to the Whisperforge crew for making such beautiful stories and stunning soundscapes that they inspire me to spend several hours of my life chasing down the song of an adorable small European insectivore. @mischaetc keep doing that amazing thing you do with sounds, and hey, I’m ready for my next obscure side quest.
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