Yeah, me too. But this one was insistent that he was a morning bird.
I personally love the dawn chorus, but for some reason a single bird is annoying while dozens can be charming.
Mourning doves were a commonplace at dawn in SoCal growing up. And now here in SoFl as well.
I sometimes think their range is “everywhere”.
Well, the little beasts are at it again, this time at precisely 4:00 AM, as opposed to the previously mentioned 3:58 AM. Why were the beasts off by two minutes? Maybe because it’s 9 days later in the season, or maybe because it’s been pissing rain all night in order to make it difficult for me to take the garbage out to the curb. But still, I admire their punctuality, even in inclement weather. Though, perhaps because of weather, the dawn chorus was very brief this morning.
These days you can listen to a dawn chorus anytime you want with a click on youtube or any number of websites. In the pre-internet days of 1970 your options were much more limited, one of them being side 2 of the second Environments album, “Dawn At New Hope Pennsylvannia”
Unless you live in Alaska, that is pretty much the case in the United States. They’re very adaptable and very prolific.
Thanks for the link. Although mourning doves are apparently everywhere, I actually had no idea what they looked like. I hear them but never see them. They’re very pretty and their call is pleasantly soothing, so they can procreate all they want!
Be happy you don’t have a mockingbird outside your window!
That happened to me many years ago. The darned thing started its repertoire every night for weeks at precisely midnight (within 10 minutes), and sang the songs of seventy different birds while I was trying to get to sleep.
After a nice nap I was on the computer once again late at night, and because the weather is cool, the windows are wide open. And I now hear the little beasts bursting into song at 3:51 AM. Official sunrise today is 5:38 AM.
We are now nearly a week past the summer solstice. I think one can conclude that the tweeting beasts reported in the OP starting up at 3:58 AM 18 days ago are remarkably good at sensing whatever it is that they’re sensing.
OMG! My wife and I just got back from a camping trip to a National Forest in the nearby mountains. The first night there, while we were enjoying the brilliant firefly display, we heard some whippoorwills off in the distance and it was quite lovely. Once we returned to our campsite and were preparing for bed, the whippoorwills had greatly increased in number and proximity creating quite the cacophony. And it wasn’t just a single call followed by a response from a different bird. Oh, no, it was more like each bird trying to intensely out-do all of the others in a contest of who could produce the most (and loudest) consecutive calls without pausing for a breath. And one of the prime contestants sounded like it was in our campsite, possibly next to the fire ring. This went of for what seemed like forever, but was most likely not more than an hour.
But wait, there’s more! After being gently serenaded to sleep (not!) we were rudely awakened somewhere around 4:30am by an encore performance of the whole routine, including the exuberant contestant within our own campsite. And the entire ordeal was repeated each morning and evening for the duration of our stay. That particular location will forevermore be known as “Whippoorwill Hell” in the annals of our travels.