Species in Focus: Orchard Oriole

In the upcoming special episodes I’m going to feature songbird species who fit three criteria: that I have plenty of recordings of them, that I have not significantly featured them before, and that they are not likely to be featured in the next season of Songbirding because they do no occur in the west, or have not shown up significantly in my western recordings as of right now.

The Orchard Oriole has a curious song. Much like the Baltimore Oriole, each bird might have a slightly different song, with their own unique phrases.

This songbird has quite a varied appearance, with lemony-yellow females, and males with two plumages: one of a yellow bird with a black beard, typically seen in the second year of the bird’s life, followed up with a more mature plumage of a dark back and hood with what I like to refer to as a blood-orange chest, though some describe this more as a chestnut colour. Either way, the older males are quite a dark bird.

I find that the Orchard Oriole usually sounds like it is frequently interrupting its own whistle-y songs with terse, harsh interjections. And to my ears, sounds almost like an Eastern Warbling Vireo, except that it is interrupting its own songs.

For this episode we’ll be exploring three locations within my Ontario breeding bird atlas square, in Haldimand County, Ontario. I’ve found over the years of this survey that this species is highly successful in Haldimand, showing up in a high proportion of my random point count surveys.

Credits

Songbirding: Species in Focus is a Songbirding Studios production.

Recorded, engineered, narrated and created by Rob Porter.

The Songbirding cover art (Blackburnian Warbler) is by Lauren Helton: https://tinylongwing.carbonmade.com/projects/5344062

Creative Commons music is from Universfield.

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