1284 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 part 3 



Harrison F. Lewis told Arthur A. Allen that he rendered the song 

 as "Oh gee — it was the whiz-whiskey," to which the fox sparrow, so 

 often a neighbor in the northland, would answer, "Well, my dear, 

 why did you take it?" 



The open, windy nature of the semibarrens that the white-crowns 

 occupy in summer diminishes the impression their song makes on 

 human visitors; so many songs are wafted away on the wind that 

 only dominant phrases force themselves on the traveler's attention. 

 The word renditions given above are the subjective efforts of pre- 

 technological field ornithology. Today's field students use tape 

 recorders and analyze their input from the visual record of a sound 

 spectrograph that allows direct reading and comparison of duration 

 and pitch. Donald J. Borror (1961) has analyzed a number of 

 white-crown song recordings made by W. W. H. Gunn in northern 

 Ontario and has provided the following objective description: 



The song usually begins with one to three clear whistled notes that are steady 

 in pitch, and ends with three buzzy notes, the last lower in pitch than the two 

 preceding. The first note is about 0.5 sec in length; if there are two or three 

 similar introductory notes the second and third are a little shorter. The final 

 buzzy notes are uttered at three to four per sec. Sometimes there are short 

 clear notes or two-note phrases in the middle of the song and sometimes the 

 second or third note of the song is slurred. One or two of the final buzzes (except 

 the last) may begin with a short sharp note or be slightly up-slurred or both. 

 Some songs end in a low trill rather than a low buzzy note. The songs of a 

 given bird are usually very similar, but those of different birds often vary slightly. 



The pitch of the white-crown's song is between 2,600 and 7,200 

 cycles per second. 



Morning and evening song periods usually involve 15 to 20 minutes 

 of uninterrupted song, and as each song is of 2-second duration and 

 the interval between songs is 9 to 10 seconds, the total output during 

 such a burst may be 100 or more songs. I have counted 194 consecu- 

 tive songs. 



Francis Harper (1958) writes the principal call note as "a tsit, 

 which, when heard near at hand, seems to have a slight metallic 

 rasp." Charles W. Townsend and Glover M. Allen (1907) distin- 

 guished a metallic chink call note from a sharper chip alarm note. 

 In my field notes I described the call note as pete, identical by both 

 sexes, and the alarm notes as higher pitched than the ordinary scold 

 note. 



Amelia R. Laskey (in litt.) mentions a ventriloquial song of the 

 immature as follows: "At first the songs, coming at intervals, seemed 

 to emanate from shrubs some 15 feet behind the bird, but as it came 

 closer I could see its bill open and close. It was a lengthier song 

 than the adults give in spring, and the bird erected its crown feathers 

 as it sang." 



