Expert: Julia Booth - 5/26/2008

Question
Hope you can help me identify a bird from it's call. I live in Essex county New York and my best description of the call is it sounds like someone hitting an old metal pipe swing set  or corner street sign post with a hammer. It's a single call repeated about every 5 seconds. The first time that I heard it, I thought that someone was hammering on a pipe but the other day the bird flew over head and sounded it's call. I unfortunately couldn't see it clearly because of the tree cover. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.  

Thank You
Robert Austin

Answer
That's a tough one, because you didn't get a visual.

It could be any number of species. The fact that you mentioned it being done in flight and repeatedly does means it's a "call" and not a "song" -the two are different in purpose. So it's a male being territorial and perhaps looking for a mate.

A Raven will make sounds that don't seem like they could possibly be organic in origin -some of which are banging and clicking.

The mention of metal makes me think of Red-Winged or Brewer's Blackbirds, who are often described as sounding like rusty, metal hinges.

ENature.com has a decent menu of sound bytes for most birds native to North America. You can enter your zipcode and it will give you a list (not necessarily complete) of the birds in your area. You could try there. If you get a better look at the culprit, feel free to let me know and maybe that will help narrow it down a bit.

Julia