Every year, November marks "Silvereye Season" - the month where the bottlebrush outside my window blooms, and the silvereyes come jauntily swooping in to feast on the nectar, pulling all manner of cute and adorable acrobatics. Sadly, this year's season has been heavily interrupted + restricted by a series of home renovations we've been doing that just happened to need to coincide with this month... *sigh*
As a result, this year, I've been limited to only getting a literal handful of very short shooting windows this year, and an even smaller number of OK photos, of which the ones above are probably the sum total...
(There were also a bunch of early ones where I managed to capture 2-3 staging a surprise visit just when I got home... but those aren't that great quality due to only having a short zoom + wrong camera settings on an afternoon with very average lighting, so I won't be posting those online)
You may also notice that the colours are a bit punchier than usual, as I've also been forced to trial a new photo processing pipeline (i.e. Darktable) as noted in a previous post.
To somewhat make up for that, I decided to properly archive up a series of notes I posted over on Mastodon earlier today about the different types of silvereye calls + vocalisations that I'm currently aware of, or that I can easily name / list. I was of course inspired to make this list as it seems that most reference texts covering these cuties all played "copy the (singular + crappy / inaccurate) textbook" before AI came along and started doing that and making a mess.
So, without further ado, here are my notes on silvereye vocalisations!
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I often read descriptions of Silvereyes / Tauhou making a so-called "cree" call when alone. I suspect they all copied from that same single source.
What they're referring to is what I often call "chiee". It is but one of several calls those birds make (but if you were to refer to those guides, you'd be seriously mistaken)
e.g. At the most basic level, you have:
* "Chieeee" - Very lonesome sounding (tone dropping) "contact call" when alone
* "Chi chi chi chi chi" - If you only ever hear this urgent rapid-fire seq (growing fainter), your opsec needs work! That is the sound of one or more of them rapidly fleeing the area because of you!
What you really want to hear for these birds are:
* 1) Long lyrical trilly warbling song. Loud + Bright sounding (i.e. "It's a really beautifully warm + sunny day). Birds are typically in a really happy + chipper mood on such days.
* 2) Loud + rapid chorus of multiple VERY excited echoey high pitched chie-like calls (dunno how to describe) coming from a bush - They've discovered something exciting there, and they're all flocking to get in on the action! (You really want to hear this when trying to catch a bunch of them in action!)
* 3) Loud short and sharp "chiiiee" (going up) - "I'm here!" - As they swoop in
* 4) Soft and quiet/hushed, almost there, sweet trilly warbling in nearby bush. Bell like. "Yum! The food here is really tasty, isn't it babe"
* 5) "Di> di di, Di> di di" (d'' b' c'' d'' b' c'') - Slightly microtonally out of tune, incessant repeating of these 3 notes, often quite loud == A hungry juvenile!
* 6) Yiddling / Laughing Sound - I still don't know what this means, or why they do it. A very fun sound, but I still don't know when / why they do it
All of those are only the obvious ones I can think of too! There are a
few variations on those that you also have to master to really spot them
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