60. Purple martin song flights.
7. When to Sing, and How
Night singing
From page 127 in the book.
Purple martin song flights. For "human nightowls," for those who enjoy the predawn hours, purple martins offer fascinating listening. What a puzzle that cloud of singing males is, high overhead. At what time, relative to sunrise, do these older males depart their martin house and head skyward? Can I recognize the unique song of any particular individual way up there, to monitor how he moves about? How does the cloud of singers shift in space over time? And how does the dawn singing change through the season? Is there really more dawn singing when the older martins first arrive in spring, and far less after most of the first-year males and females have straggled into the breeding colony from their South American, nonbreeding home?