BROADCASTS.com

I still have a cold, so let's let some birds do part of the talking in this episode about more weird bird calls!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nListen to the Loudest Bird Ever Recorded\n\nFurther listening/watching:\n\nA video of the screaming piha. You need to see this.\n\nThe yellow-bellied sapsucker is a real bird, and an adorable one too:\n\n\n\nThe mute swan is not actually mute:\n\n\n\nThe white bellbird is the loudest bird ever recorded (photo by Anselmo d\u2019Affonseca):\n\n\n\nThe screaming piha is hilariously loud. Left, sitting like a normal bird. Right, screaming:\n\n \n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nI still have this rotten cold, although I\u2019m getting over it. As you can hear, my voice is pretty messed up, so for this episode I\u2019ll let birds do some of the talking for me. Yes, it\u2019s another weird bird calls episode!\n\nWe\u2019ll start with this cute little call:\n\n[yellow-bellied sapsucker call]\n\nThat\u2019s not a dog\u2019s squeaky toy, it\u2019s a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Yes, that\u2019s a real bird. It\u2019s a type of woodpecker that lives in much of eastern and northern North America, breeding in Canada and spending winters in the eastern United States and Mexico. I get them in my yard sometimes. The sapsucker will also drum on dead trees and other items to make a loud sound to communicate with other sapsuckers.\n\nIt mostly eats tree sap, but it also eats berries, small insects, and fruit. To get the tree sap, it drills small holes in tree bark, usually in neat rows, and licks up the sap that oozes from the holes. If you ever see a tree with rows of little holes in the bark, that was done by a sapsucker. It can sometimes even kill trees this way, but for the most part it doesn\u2019t hurt the tree unless the tree is already dying.\n\nMales and females both forage for insects to feed their babies. They usually dip the insects in tree sap before feeding them to the chicks. Yummy!\n\nNext up is this little grunty call:\n\n[mute swan call]\n\nMaybe it\u2019s not exciting or loud, but it\u2019s made by a bird you wouldn\u2019t expect to hear, the mute swan. I mean, the word mute is right there in its name but it\u2019s not mute at all. The mute swan is a big white waterfowl from Eurasia, although it\u2019s been introduced to other parts of the world since it\u2019s so pretty. Its legs are black with an orange and black bill, and it has a long neck that it uses to reach plants that are deeper underwater than ducks and most geese can get at. Its wingspan can be seven and a half feet across, or 2.4 meters. It\u2019s more closely related to the black swan of Australia and the black-necked swan of South America than it is to other swan species from Eurasia.\n\nMute swans get their name not because they can\u2019t make sounds, obviously, but because they\u2019re not as noisy as other swan species. Not only does it make the little grunting sounds we just heard, it will sometimes hiss aggressively if a person or animal gets too close to its nest. Also, swans can give you such a wallop with their wings that they could knock you out stone cold, so it\u2019s best to just watch them from a distance and not get too close. When mute swans fly, their wings make a distinctive thrumming sound that helps them stay in contact with other mute swans. This is what their wingbeats sound like:\n\n[mute swans flying]\n\nThat sounds more like a UFO than a bird, just saying.\n\nNext is a weird metallic call that doesn\u2019t sound like a noise a bird could make either. It sounds like an industrial machine of some kind:\n\n[white bellbird call]\n\nThat\u2019s the sound the male white bellbird gives to attract a female. It also happens to be the loudest bird call ever recorded. In late 2018, an ornithologist from Brazil teamed up with a bioacoustician from the United States. They traveled into the mountainous forests of the Brazilian Amazon to record both the white bellbird and our next bird, which I\u2019ll get to in a minute.\n\nThe male white bellbird is white with a black bill with a lo...