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A ‘viral’ new bird song in Canada is causing sparrows to change their tune
- yesenadam 6y agoMaybe this is common, but I just noticed it - I scrolled down a bit on the website, and suddenly it took 5 or 6 Back button clicks to come back here. Each mini-article loads a new URL.. Looks like you're on the same page but seems like you're not. There's something I really don't like about that! If you went right to the bottom, if there is one, it might take dozens of Back clicks to get off the page. Which effectively disables your back button. I've seen bottomless pages on sites, but they don't usually load a bunch of URLs like that in your history, do they?
- _def 6y agoI wanted to read the article but couldn't, because they forced some unrelated video up in there which steals my attention completely
- ComputerGuru 6y agoAnd breaks scrolling because it overlays on top of the text.
- feross 6y agoThis is the history.pushState() API in action. I use it on https://theannoyingsite.com https://theannoyingsite.com to fill the history with entries to effectively disable the back button. Also, this one is a gem: window.addEventListener('popstate', () => { window.history.forward() }) Source code here: https://github.com/feross/TheAnnoyingSite.com/blob/master/static/index.js https://github.com/feross/TheAnnoyingSite.com/blob/master/st...
- Shared404 6y agoI don't know if I hate this or love it.
- fphhotchips 6y agoI loved it. I feel like I should get bonus points for killing the DVD bouncing cat by hitting the exit button as it moved around rather than just using Alt-F4...
- Shared404 6y agoI cheated for most of the things like that. I have tiling turned on in my DE, I didn't even realize that things were supposed to be moving until I was almost done.
- vardump 6y agoDamn. That site truly is annoying. It downloads files, does bing searches with... not so nice search terms, etc. Don't click it!
- yesenadam 6y agoI watched a vid of your The Most Annoying Website talk a while ago. I'm not sure which of the many versions it was: https://www.google.com/search?q=annoying+site+feross&tbm=vid https://www.google.com/search?q=annoying+site+feross&tbm=vid Highly recommended! It's very funny, and safer than actually visiting the site, by the sound of it.
- hetspookjee 6y agoHa, I really appreciate the music choice! Ziad - Elektronik Supersonik for anyone who's wondering.
- enriquto 6y agoAh, the pleasures of browsing the web without javascript! For us, it is a regular article that loads instantly (no cookie warnings nor ads) and does not play tricks with the back button.
- speedgoose 6y agoHowever you have to debug 75% of the websites you visit to enable back javascript.
- sildur 6y agoNo, not really. They look uglier, but load way faster. They have to keep being indexable so they have to play nice.
- enriquto 6y agoExactly. The vast majority of sites that store text and simple images are perfectly readable without javascript, and the experience is much, much better. In some rare cases, the site does not load at all, and I do not bother to switch javascript on, unless I am really interested in that particular site. Being a fan of the default browser styles I contend your observation that "bare" sites look uglier. In fact, having a consistent visual style across sites becomes rather agreeable, instead of allowing each site to set up its style.
- sildur 6y agoWell, I too really like the default browser styles. But the problem is that, with JavaScript disabled, a lot of things that would be hidden by Javascript (like menus and things like that) now appear all cluttered at once. That is what I meant by uglier.
- throwaway8941 6y ago>Which effectively disables your back button. Press the right mouse button on it when you have this problem.
- coronadisaster 6y agoNot sure if it's because of my settings but the back button works as expected on Firefox mobile even after scrolling all the way down in the article.
- makapuf 6y agoSo that's what you call a viral tweet.
- uhhyeahdude 6y agoI have never upvoted with such reluctance.
- have_faith 6y agoCarlos!
- wodenokoto 6y agoBack before the iPhone when Nokia was the defacto phone, there were news stories that birds had started to chime the Nokia ringtone or the Nokia sms chime. Back then I totally believed it, but I’ve grown skeptic, but it looks like it is not completely outlandish.
- ajuc 6y agoMy mother told me when she was a kid they used to whistle melodies at birds and some repeated them after a while. Especially starlings.
- xkyscore 6y agoI'm surprised McDonald's haven't tried teaching birds to whistle their melody, free advertising
- _sillymarketing 6y agoExcept all the work in training the birds...
- xwdv 6y agoThat part might be cheap. Still gotta feed and house them while they learn.
- thedonkeycometh 6y agoI remember hearing nokia ringtones sung by birds while waiting for at bus stops in the late 90s
- bayindirh 6y agoI had an Alcatel One Touch Easy and One Touch Max. Both had high chirpy tones and powerful speakers. My budgerigar have learnt that I always responded to SMS tone of the phones and started to mimic them when she wanted some time with me. She did them with pinpoint accuracy so, it was impossible to tell whether it was the phone or her. She also chirped parts of the ringtones for fun. Also we had a tune between us. I'd whistle a specific tune and she'd respond back with the same tune (or vice versa). It was a kind of pinging each other.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- henearkr 6y agoI wonder, if I play this video during a walk in the nearby mountain in Japan, will the song be picked up by the local species? The scientists would have a new mystery on their hands lol!
- xoa 6y ago>if I play this video during a walk in the nearby mountain in Japan I know you're probably joking here, but since it's an important area of honest lack of knowledge I really want to point: please please don't ever do this everyone. Not just this video specifically but play any bird song at all outside. Many of the guide apps these days for example have collections of bird songs for each species as another aid in identification, and sometimes people play them to try to attract said birds to see them. But this can genuinely screw things up for a few poor birds and be another pebble of human caused misery added onto species in trouble. Birds use song in part as a gauge for health and thus mating and territory. This is intuitive if you think about it: to produce more, better song requires a strong healthy respiratory system, syrinx and so on. But no bird can match the output of speakers, and recorded song samples are often chosen for being particularly clear and high quality. So if you play it, females may spend their time searching around for this incredible magnificent perfect specimen of birdliness who doesn't exist, and refuse to mate with other males. And other males themselves may just leave the territory. If you've got a single well fit earphone or something of that order and play at low volume that can work, or else make recordings of the songs then replay them and try to identify them after getting back indoors. But all those songs are just for show and fun, they're an important part of bird life cycles, so please be careful to enjoy them without disrupting them.
- henearkr 6y agoDon't worry I was joking, but thank you because I was not conscious of the part when the speaker becomes the unrivaled imaginary male. In any case if there is any chance of changing the traditional song of bird species, I would feel like this is akin to introducing an alien species on a new continent, and that sounds like a terrible idea, so I would avoid doing that by any means.
- mhxion 6y agoOriginal journal: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)30771-5 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)... Watch the video at the bottom. It says: > A hypothesis suggests that, female birds may habituate to the common songs over time, and that drives the male bird to adopt novel songs to maintain female's interest.
- sunkenvicar 6y agoSparrows moved into the neighbourhood this year. We noticed their chirping is incredibly annoying. Turns out it’s the two-chirp version. For us this sound doesn’t fade into the background because it sounds synthetic or man made. About as annoying as a back up beeper on a truck.
- unicornmama 6y agoWhen I try to read the article on mobile, an unstoppable video fills up 1/3 of my screen. The video is unrelated to the article and has no obvious UX to stop or dismiss. Gizmodo’s website is fucking stupid. Who comes up with this shit?
- mattraibert 6y agoHere's an alternate write up: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/science/sparrow-bird-song.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/science/sparrow-bird-song... It even has audio clips of the two melodies.
- fxoobarr__ 6y agoand this one is cut in half. So i won't read the rest of it, cause nytimes requires subscription
- cavanasm 6y agoThe hedge fund placed exec who has been running Gizmodo into the ground for the last year. Part of a larger trend of user-hostile design changes that have caused quite a lot of controversy as they attempt to extract as much value in the short term as they can. Last time they implemented this exact change it only lasted a few days before the writers at most of the Gizmodo sites more or less openly revolted. It resulted in the shut down of the left leaning news site though. I'm wondering whether we'll see a repeat, or if they'll shrug and give up.
- naavis 6y agoWhat kind of short term value does this kind of stuff extract? Does forcing visitors to watch a video bring ad revenue or something?
- jojobas 6y agoRelated: lyrebirds passing on flute tunes long after the guy who played them died. https://www.chonday.com/lynibird18/ https://www.chonday.com/lynibird18/
- vezycash 6y agoHere's a bird singing pirate of Caribbean tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpR8BeLR_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpR8BeLR_Q Another singing Adam's family reunion tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD_tPNYgy58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD_tPNYgy58 And finally Star wars Darth Vader tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjoCi04Rxwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjoCi04Rxwg
- Stevvo 6y agoI have a speaker in my garden that plays bird songs to the birds, recorded from those same birds. They interact with the 'birds' in the speaker by singing back to them. I'm curious if I could infect those birds with new songs by editing those recordings.
- gbrown 6y agoThat may be harmful to some birds, FYI. Among wildlife photographers, playing bird calls is sometimes considered unethical as it can interfere with their natural behavior, cause stress responses, interfere with mating activity, etc. Guide from Audubon on using calls: https://www.audubon.org/news/how-use-birdcall-apps https://www.audubon.org/news/how-use-birdcall-apps
- tzs 6y agoI've on occasion been sitting on my deck reading, while numerous birds are there eating the seeds and peanuts I put out on the deck rail for them and the squirrels. A few times I've played bird sounds from Cornell's "Merlin" app [1] for them from my iPad. So far I've not got any response at all that I could detect. I've tried playing sounds from the same species, including alarm or distress calls, and I've tried playing calls from their predators such as hawks that are known to be in this area. I wonder if the iPad is just not high enough fidelity to fool them? PS: if it worked I wasn't going to keep doing it. I just wanted to see if they would be fooled by my iPad. Obviously I don't actually want to scare the birds away--if I didn't mind birds I wouldn't be putting out food for them in the first place. [1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/ https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
- tinus_hn 6y agoNext up: getting birds to sing your advertising jingles
- bbarnett 6y agoROTFL, enter nest seeking drone. A small, low powered device with solar panels gets auto-clamped a few feet from nest. For the first few weeks of life, baby birds hear your tune, driving it deep into their very essence of self. I am bird, ergo I sing this.
- daodedickinson 6y agoNever found a video of killdeer online that sounded anything like the killdeer at my home have sounded like the last 30 or so years.
- stallmanite 6y agoNow’s your chance to become an obscure YouTube birdsong maven.
- Ericson2314 6y agoI have no idea what's "doublet" or "triplet" about the two bird songs. If they just mean the number of notes, it almost seems like they got the labeling backwards.
- athriren 6y agoIt’s the phrasing of the notes. The “triplet” ending song goes da, da, da da da, da da da. The “doublet” ending song goes da, da, da da, da da, da da. Disclaimer: I am not a music theory wizard, but I do play drums.
- Ericson2314 6y agoRhythm is not these birds strong point, but I can sort of make out a barely-articulated 3rd in not the first one?
- verytrivial 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_level_geolocator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_level_geolocator -- How they get rough but scientifically useful tracking information from a device small enough to attach to a sparrow leg!
- punnerud 6y agoI love this technique! Using a light sensor to measure sunset/sunrise and then calculate the location.
- ericol 6y agoTo keep up with the current times, wouldn't it be better to call it a "meme" song?
- pvaldes 6y agoOne does not simply chirp, chirp, chirp with the eagles
- marklacey 6y agoI spent two summers in an apartment in San Francisco that was near the nest of what I assume was a nightingale. Every night around midnight it would start singing. It would loop through maybe 8 songs. Some of them sounded very much like the local environment. For example one song was pretty much identical to sirens that I would periodically hear. It would last for an hour or two each night. I don’t know where the bird went the rest of the year. That was almost ten years ago and I still miss falling asleep to that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gloftus 6y agoWe have those in Boston, I always thought they were mockingbirds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhiyxmWI95Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhiyxmWI95Q
- marklacey 6y agoYes you’re right. Judging by Wikipedia it seems likely it was a northern mockingbird.
- Cerium 6y agoIn San Jose we have birds that imitate car alarms. I don't like them at all.
- marklacey 6y agoYes that’s one thing this bird would do. The whole cycle of two or three repetitive sounds from an alarm before moving to another song.
- mcv 6y agoAges ago, probably during the age of Nokia phones, I heard about some birds (blackbirds I think) adopting popular Nokia ringtones as their call.
- 6y ago
- Avshalom 6y agoOh I've seen this movie before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_(film)
- mistersquid 6y agoOK so yours is a bit of a troll, and at some risk of feeding, I'll offer that Pontypool is such a conceptually amazing film, exploring as it does the intersection of language, media, and mortality.
- snvzz 6y agoThese two phrases... to me they seem like the new one "answers" to the old one. Maybe it's something to do with it. They're happy they found a "continuation" to the previous phrase.
- joubert 6y agoTweet memetic.
- _spduchamp 6y agoYou can train starlings to speak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhBaVInb3jI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhBaVInb3jI This is the medium of Brian D Collier's brilliant art project Teach the Starlings http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/html/intro.htm http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/html/intro.htm
- lisper 6y agoWow, that was really impressive. But your second link is broken. I think it should be: http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/introduction.html http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/introduction.html This bit is hilarious: > HOW TO TEACH STARLINGS THEIR NEW CALL > The first and most simple strategy is to find a starling and shout "Schieffelin" to it.
- cvs268 6y agoBy now, birds must have developed a low opinion of us hoomans and our "cold-calling" techniques! We either post mating calls, the bird equivalent of "Singles in your area..." or post danger calls, the bird equivalent of trolling flamebait. I bet there's a market opportunity for a HN for Birds!