Super fast singers
9 July 2008 - Coen Elemans and his colleagues at the University of Utah at Salt Lake City discovered that songbirds can contract their muscles faster than any other vertebrate can. The vocal muscles of the European starling and zebra finch close 100 times faster than it takes for a human eye to blink. The muscles contract and relax within only 3 to 4 milliseconds. The fastest movement among humans is blinking, which takes approximately 400 milliseconds. Thus birds can sing at frequencies of up to 250 hertz and modulate the volume and frequency of their song faster than any it takes for any other vertebrate to contract a muscle. This allows them to change the various elements of their song 250 times per second.
vogelstimmen.de offers thousands of free links to recordings of birdsongs from a list of over 10000 birds. You can search the database of recordings with just two clicks. Start learning about or expanding your knowledge of birdsongs.
Do so with the CDs listed under Recordings. These enable you to identify birdsongs anywhere and without having to go online. >>
If you need something pleasing to the ear, but are only familiar with blackbirds, finches, and starlings, click on Examples, where you will find listening suggestions. You can email them to friends or use them as a basis for a new and more detailed search >>.
Perhaps one day I'll get around to adding a new category called Most Beautiful Recordings or something along those lines. Not really meant for bird lovers, but rather to offer something soothing for the soul.
Birds by cell phone
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