Which bird sounds like a laser, a video game or a phone?

A single pew, a low gurgle that leaps to a high, sliding whistle, is a Brown-headed Cowbird, the usual answer in a yard or pasture. A sharp squeak from high overhead on the West Coast is a male Anna's Hummingbird pulling out of a dive, and the sound comes from his tail feathers, not his throat. An actual ringtone, alarm or beep, repeated a few times and then swapped for something else, is a Northern Mockingbird or a European Starling copying your neighborhood. At dusk in spring, a buzzy robot peent from a wet field is an American Woodcock.

How to tell them apart

• Does it slide? A pew that starts low and shoots up is a cowbird.
• Is it one loud squeak from the sky? In the West, look up for a hummingbird climbing for another dive.
• Is it a real phone? A note-perfect ringtone that repeats and then turns into a cardinal is a mockingbird. One buried in whistles and clicks is a starling.
• Is it dusk in spring? A nasal, buzzy beep every couple of seconds from a damp field is a woodcock.

The pew: cowbird and the other blackbirds

The Brown-headed Cowbird is the bird most often behind a laser sound, and it is common from coast to coast wherever there is open ground: pastures, cattle feedlots, farmland. The male's song starts with a very low, watery glug-glug and jumps to an extremely high glee, a leap the Smithsonian's National Zoo says covers the greatest range of pitch of any North American songbird. That top note is thin, pure and sliding, which is exactly the recipe for a sound effect.

The Common Grackle is the runner-up. Its call is a sharp, harsh, high note that Audubon compares to a rusty hinge, its breeding song is a run of whew notes that speed up into a loud creaking scrape, and Wikipedia notes it occasionally sounds like a buzzing power line. The Red-winged Blackbird's rich o-ka-leeee only turns synthetic in its final trill.

The squeak from the sky: Anna's Hummingbird

On the West Coast, a loud single squeak or pop from high in the air is a male Anna's Hummingbird at the bottom of his courtship dive. He climbs about 130 feet, then drops toward the female at around 27 meters per second, and at the bottom he produces a sound described as an explosive squeak or a loud pop. Researchers showed in 2008 that the noise is not vocal at all: air rushing past his tail feathers makes them sing, so the bird is quite literally chirping with its tail.

From a perch he gives a thin, scratchy, metallic song with buzzes mixed in. Anna's was once a bird of the Pacific coast, but since the 1950s it has spread north to British Columbia and east to Arizona, so the dive squeak now happens over city parks.

The phone in the tree: mockingbird and starling

If the sound is an actual ringtone, car alarm or warning beep, you are hearing a mimic. The Northern Mockingbird copies other birds first, but Tennessee's wildlife agency lists musical instruments, warning bells, cell phones, car horns and creaky hinges among the sounds it borrows. A male can hold as many as 200 song types and keeps adding to them all his life. The tell is repetition: each phrase is repeated three or more times, then dropped for the next, so the phone rings three times and turns into a wren.

The European Starling is the other suspect, and it leans toward whistled sounds: Killdeer, quail and Red-tailed Hawk imitations, plus, as the radio program BirdNote puts it, a car alarm or a phone ring. Its song opens with pure whistles, runs through borrowed birds and man-made noises, adds a run of clicks and ends in a burst of high notes. A mockingbird's phone comes out clean with pauses around it; a starling's is buried in the noise.

The chime and the robot: Blue Jay and American Woodcock

The Blue Jay is known for its screaming jay, jay and its hawk impressions, but Missouri's field guide says its voice runs from soft murmurs to clear, chime-like whistles, and those clear whistles are the notes people describe as electronic.

The American Woodcock is the strangest entry. On spring evenings, at dusk and on moonlit nights, a male stands in a forest opening or old field and gives a short, buzzy, nasal peent about every two seconds, a sound most people compare to a small robot. Then he launches, spiraling 50 to 100 yards up while air rushing through his outer wing feathers makes a musical twittering, and zigzags back down chirping. The twitter, like the hummingbird's squeak, is a feather sound rather than a voice.

Why so many birds sound electronic

Electronic sounds are simple. A pure tone is a single sine wave with no harmonics, and a video game pew or a phone beep is usually a pure tone whose pitch slides quickly up or down. Engineers call that slide a chirp, a name taken from birds, and chirped signals run sonar, radar and laser systems. A songbird makes sound with a syrinx at the bottom of its windpipe, sets pitch by changing the tension on the membranes inside it, and can work the two sides independently: a machine built for clean whistles and fast sweeps. Add feathers that whistle on their own, as in the hummingbird's tail and the woodcock's wings, and you have a sound library that was around long before the synthesizer.

How to settle it

Start with place and time. Open country by day and a single sliding pew: cowbird. West Coast, a squeak from the sky: hummingbird. A note-perfect ringtone that repeats and then changes: mockingbird. A buzzy beep from a wet field at dusk: woodcock. If the bird stays out of sight, open Warble and let it listen. Every sound on this page repeats, so you will get a second chance.

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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.