Daeseage

Since moving from Dayton, Ohio to a Gulf Coast Florida retirement/vacation town in 2023, I’ve been trying to learn my way around a vastly different climate zone and seasonal cycle, with an unfamiliar range of plant and animal life; even the lawn weeds are different. Egrets and ibises, whom I’d only ever seen in National Geographic, drink from puddles in the alley; neon-orange iguanas swim the canals and scurry through the trees.

The soundscape is a whole new territory as well; for some while I’ve been going nuts trying to identify the source of a specific animal noise.

For context: there’s a genre of YouTube prank video presented as a nature segment on animal sounds. Understand that I’m not talking about things like the woodcock meeping to “Shine” by Collective Soul, or the elephant shrew singing “Angel of Music”; that sort of Gag Dub requires free-associational wit, imagination, and timing.)

No; I’m thinking of those instances where What The Fox Says turns out to be…some intoxicated dudebro screaming because the sound of his own voice is comedy platinum. That’s the joke. (One that, from inside my skin, stopped being funny fifteen minutes before the first example was posted.)

That said: around the neighborhood, most often around dusk and when crossing the park, I periodically hear a screeching tenor-pitched “EEP! EEP! EEP!” (1) that sounds for all the world like some YouTubebro’s idea of the call of some ungainly Dr. Seussian bird (or perhaps a neurodivergent person’s oddball mannerism.) I’ve heard it from altitudes, in open air and receding in flight, that would seem to rule out a human (who isn’t a phenomenal ventriloquist or somehow broadcasting through a drone.)

It’s not a limpkin. I’m in a residential complex fairly distant from the waterline, and the limpkin’s infamous Call Of The Wild tends to be heard where their preferred snail prey concentrates, out in the mangrove hammocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2b_M5UAEwo (2)

A couple times I attempted to record the sound, but my cheap-ass flip phone proved no match for the background ruckus of the dawn and dusk choruses, nearly drowned out in turn by high winds and the anthropospheric noises of traffic and surrounding businesses. What I did succeed in witnessing, though, was a heated difference of opinion between a crow and a YouTubeBro Bird, establishing it as a large pigeon-sized brown perching bird with a long pointed tail. (Both were atop utility poles, silhouetted against the sunset, obscuring further identifying details.)

Xeno-canto.org, a crowdsourced website devoted to cataloguing animal sounds, solved the mystery; the Phantom Screecher turns out to be the Eurasian Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto): https://xeno-canto.org/909839

That’s its flight/alarm call, distinct from its usual hoo-HOO-hoo location call or the flustered twittering of flight feathers it shares with the native (and visually similar) Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura); both can be heard in the background.

(1) For optimum effect, imagine that rendered in a jagged green Halloween font.

(2) During the mating season, the Song Of Their People can go on 24/7 (raising the question of how exactly their sleep cycle works); the most persistent loudmouths are single males.