Songs of Insects

Yellow-rumped Warbler Songs

Below are 7 spectrogram videos of 7 different Yellow-rumped Warblers. The first one is most likely a juvenile doing practice song. The next 6 are adults singing on their breeding grounds.

To work with these videos and to be able to compare the spectrograms, first allow the spectrogram videos to load. On a really fast connection, they may start to auto-play. Next, one at a time, click on each video to start it, press the pause button then move the playhead back to the beginning of the video. Do this for each until they are all paused and the playhead is at the beginning.

Now, for the bottom 6 spectrograms, you can play each video and compare the first song in each recording to the other recordings. You can move the playhead around to see the other songs in each male’s performance and compare these to the other songs he has sung. Playing a video of the adults on their breeding grounds will reveal that each male is singing very similar songs, one after the other, with only minor changes in the number of repetitions of the different syllables in his song.

Now, play the first (top) video of the possible AHY (after hatch year) male. His songs are not repetitive and vary greatly, both in length and in the syllables used for each song. This appears to be subsong or practice song as the male is learning to sing the songs properly that he memorized during the late summer of the previous year’s breeding season.

Yellow-rumped Warbler, possibly an AHY male, recorded on April 13, 2021 (WV).

Adult male Yellow-rumped Warbler recorded on the breeding grounds May 24, 1996 (NY).

Adult male Yellow-rumped Warbler recorded on the breeding grounds July 21, 1997 (NY).

Adult male Yellow-rumped Warbler recorded on the breeding grounds July 21, 1997 (NY).

Adult male Yellow-rumped Warbler recorded on the breeding grounds July 24, 1997 (NY).

Adult male Yellow-rumped Warbler recorded on the breeding grounds May 28, 1999 (NY).

Adult male Yellow-rumped Warbler recorded on the breeding grounds June 24, 1999 (Nova Scotia, CA).