California Bird Talk

Wednesday at 6:35am and 8:35am

A different kind of music
in the air!

California Bird Talk is a new series of two-minute pieces on the songs and calls of California birds. Rusten Hogness, the host of California Bird Talk, has been producing short radio pieces on California natural history for ten years, some of them on birds, but birdsong is a new passion for him.

Living up Mill Creek, outside of Healdsburg, he’d heard birds all the time. “But it wasn’t until my mother, who had Alzheimer’s, came to live with us, that I realized I didn’t know how to listen to birds,” he explains. His mother couldn’t remember much, but she always seemed to bring fresh eyes and ears to the colors and sounds around her. It rubbed off on her son. “I started listening more carefully and fell in love with birdsong.”
California Bird Talk uses recordings of California bird songs and calls, interviews with bird experts, and a variety of human music to explain how and why birds sing and call. “Most songbirds can make two sounds at once with their y-shaped voicebox, called the syrinx. Some even sing these amazing internal duets with themselves,” says Hogness. “Just knowing that makes me listen to birdsong differently. That’s the kind of thing I wanted to share with other folks.”

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