14. Indefatigable, bachelor males advertising for a mate.
3. Why and How Birds Sing
Why sing?
From page 28 in the book.
Indefatigable, bachelor males advertising for a mate. For a week or two during early spring, get to know a singing male by documenting his singing effort to attract a mate to his territory. Males typically return from migration before females; each male establishes his territory and then, until a female joins him, he is a bachelor and typically sings all day long. Enjoy all-nighters? Find a local nightjar. Don't limit yourself to whip-poor-wills, but consider their relatives, such as a chuck-will's-widow or a common poorwill. Or choose a songbird just returning from migration; warblers are fascinating, because many species use different songs in advertising for females and in fighting with males (e.g., yellow warbler, p. 115). If you don't want to choose a particular species, you could document the decline in singing for all species in an area by simply counting the number of songs or singing birds that can be heard during a selected time period each morning (e.g., a 15-minute block of time each day beginning at 9 a.m.).