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A reed warbler warbling, and maybe unknowingly laying down the guest vocal for a new pop hit.
Photo: Dan Kitwood (Getty Images)
Last fall, music producer and sound designer So Wylie pioneered what can only be called bird beat. The genre was born from her discovering the insistent call of the Saw-whet Owl, using that sound as the key sample in a pounding, immensely catchy instrumental, and posting the results on TikTok. A few months later, Wylie’s not only created a bunch of follow-up bird beats but she has also been embraced by communities of online birders eager to hear their avian pals feature on her releases.
Special to the Sun-Gazette
TOM MURRAY/Special to the Sun-Gazette
An Easter Whip-poor-will sits on a branch. The coloring of an EWPW makes it difficult for people to see, but its call of its own name is quite distinctive.
There is an enigmatic bird in our region which likes to be heard but not seen. It chants its song into the darkness of spring and summer evenings then spends the daylight hours sitting motionless in the forest, camouflaged by the grays and browns of leaf litter and tree bark.
A member of the Nightjar family of birds, it is the Eastern Whip-poor-will (antrostomus vociferus), and I, perhaps like some of you, have heard but never seen one. It is a grayish-brown bird, medium-sized and a bit bigger than a robin with large, dark-brown to blackish eyes. The only other local bird in the same family is the common nighthawk, and the populations of both birds are in steep decline in Pennsylvania.