Bird song vs. call: what is the difference?

A song is the longer, more complex performance a bird gives from a perch to claim a territory and attract a mate. In songbirds it is learned, and you hear it mostly in spring and early summer. A call is a short note with a job: a chip of alarm, a contact note that keeps a flock together, a whistle given in flight, a nestling begging. Calls are largely built in and used all year. The line between the two is fuzzy at the edges, but the rule of thumb holds: if the bird is sitting still and repeating a tune, that is song.

Song: a performance with two purposes

Ornithologists separate song from call by length, complexity and context. A song is the longer, more elaborate vocalization, and it has two main jobs: to tell other males that a territory is taken, and to tell females that the singer is available. Kenn Kaufman puts it well in his Audubon column: song is a behavior in itself. The bird picks a perch, stays put and broadcasts, while a call usually just rides along with whatever else the bird is doing.

Song does not have to be pretty to count. The Henslow's Sparrow has a song that lasts a fraction of a second and sounds like a hiccup, repeated for hours. It is a song because of what it does, not how it sounds.

Call: a short note with a job

Calls are the rest of a bird's vocabulary, and there is a lot of it. Kaufman notes that the Black-capped Chickadee has at least 16 categories of vocalizations, and only one or maybe two of them qualify as song. The Northern Cardinal likewise has at least 16 types of calls covering alarm, begging and courtship. The main kinds you will hear:

• Alarm calls warn everyone within earshot that a hawk, a cat or a person is around. Chickadees add extra dee notes when they are worked up.
• Contact calls let mates or flock members keep track of each other. A winter flock of chickadees moving through the trees is a running chick-a-dee conversation.
• Flight calls are given on the wing, often by birds migrating at night.
• Begging calls come from nestlings and fledglings that want to be fed.

Four birds where you can hear both

Learned versus built in

The deepest difference between song and call is how a bird gets them. Songbirds, the group scientists call oscines, number more than 4,000 species from the tiny Golden-crowned Kinglet to the Common Raven, and what sets them apart is that they learn their songs. A young songbird hatches with a rough template of what its species should sound like, then needs to hear adults to fill it in. It starts with a babbling subsong, practices, and settles into a fixed adult song after a couple of months. Raise one in isolation and it still sings, but the result is a poor copy that other birds may not recognize.

Calls mostly do not work that way. Ducks, gulls, chickens and doves raised without hearing adults still produce normal calls. And learning can go wrong: where Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees overlap, each species sometimes learns the other's song, which is why guides warn that song is unreliable for telling them apart there.

Outside the songbirds, only parrots and hummingbirds are known to learn their sounds. Flycatchers, which are perching birds but not oscines, sing on instinct alone.

Who sings: not only the males

In the temperate parts of the Americas and Eurasia, nearly all song comes from males. Move toward the tropics, and toward the desert belts of Australia and Africa, and it becomes normal for females to sing as much as males. More than 400 species sing duets. Even in a US backyard the rule leaks: the female Northern Cardinal sings, mainly in spring before nesting begins, and Pied-billed Grebe pairs sing back and forth across a pond to hold their territory.

Why the line is fuzzy

The song and call categories were built around songbirds, and they get stretched when applied to everyone else. Some authorities define song by function alone, so that a pigeon's short coo and even non-vocal sounds, like a woodpecker's drumming or the winnowing of a snipe's wings in display flight, count as song. Others insist that a song needs real syllable variety and rhythm. Kaufman notes that the definitions are not universally accepted.

A Downy Woodpecker is a good case. Its voice is a quiet pik and a descending rattle, both calls, but male and female take turns drumming loudly on dead limbs on their separate territories, doing exactly the job a song would do. The Mourning Dove gives a low coo-ah, coo, coo, coo that a courting male delivers with his chest puffed out and a bow: song behavior from a bird that does not learn its sounds. And a pair of Barred Owls calling back and forth through a swamp at night is doing the territorial and pair work of song, even though nobody calls an owl a songbird.

What it means when you use a sound-ID app

Songs are long, repeated and specific to a species, which makes them the easiest thing to identify by ear, for a person or for an app. Calls are short, often a single note, and many are nearly the same from one species to the next. So if an app hesitates on a chip from a hedge, that is not a failure; the problem is hard. In spring the same bird will usually climb to a perch and sing within a few minutes, and a full phrase or two gives any listener far more to work with.

Warble listens live and names the bird while it sings, so start it when the tune begins rather than on the alarm chip you got when you opened the door. If the bird only calls, note where it is and come back at dawn, when the singing is at its best.

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Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.