![]() "Songs tend to be longer and melodious calls are short and of varying intensities," she explained. We wanted to know how many different sounds a cardinal could make.įirst, Butler informed us that birds vocalize in two ways: songs and calls. Dorito? For help on that front, we spoke with " Bird Diva" Bridget Butler, who regularly appears on Vermont Public Radio to discuss avian life. Perhaps that explains why our reader couldn't name just one place where he had heard the bird - it was everywhere. They have a wide-ranging habitat that, according to Audubon, includes suburbs, thickets, swampy areas and woods - basically, wherever there are dense bushes for nesting. The males are a flamboyant red with a dashing black mask and bright-red beak. The northern cardinal isn't exactly subtle. But it raised other questions: If a cardinal call sounds like the word "Dorito," why doesn't everyone hear it that way? Why didn't we know about the Dorito bird? And is that the only sound it makes? While the means of discovery were somewhat anticlimactic, we had solved the riddle of the Dorito bird. Our reader then backed up these claims with a YouTube video he found that demonstrated the varied calls of the bird. ![]() "Thanks, because I have often wondered about the Dorito bird," another wrote.Īnd then came a firm answer: "Cardinal! It's nesting in your hedges behind our house!" a helpful neighbor wrote. "Yes! I think it's a cardinal! Not sure male or female," one woman responded. To both our surprise, some people knew exactly what he was talking about. Does anyone know about the birdcall I hear from time to time? The call sounds like the bird is saying, 'Dorito! Dorito! Dorito!'" he wrote. In turn, he posted a question to his Facebook page soliciting help. So we reached out to our petitioner for more information. It became clear that we weren't going to get anywhere without knowing where the Dorito bird was located. "In lower elevations, around water, you would hear a veery, which is a thrush and if you go to the top of Mount Mansfield, you would come across a Bicknell's thrush, a relative of the veery that you would only find at the top of Vermont's highest peaks."īoth thrushes sound similar, at least to an untrained birder listening to the recordings on the Audubon website - kind of shrill, perhaps a little needy? Just like Pfeiffer, LaBarr stressed the importance of location in identifying birds. "Personally, when I'm trying to identify birds and hear a vocalization I can't place, I grab my binoculars and go looking for it," he said. LaBarr had mixed sentiments about the Dorito bird quest. ![]() That organization studies birds and other creatures with the aid of citizen scientists and recently published a study that compiles more than 25 years of data on forest birds. ![]() Part of his job is to stand outside and identify birds by their calls, gathering information to report to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. Our second stop on the trail to the truth was Mark LaBarr, the conservation program manager at Audubon Vermont. Though he couldn't figure out which bird might chirp "Dorito," Pfeiffer said, "There is a bird - the American goldfinch - well known to say 'potato chip' when it flies." Close, but not the snack we were looking for. He said that, without knowing where the bird is, it could be difficult to determine its species based solely on call or song. WTF?įirst, we called up Montpelier biologist Bryan Pfeiffer, who's written for the New York Times, EatingWell and Field & Stream, among other publications. Since it's spring and our feathered friends are really letting loose, we agreed to find the source of that funky birdcall (which is not the same as birdsong, we would soon learn). ![]() More specifically, he wrote in asking if we could identify a bird he's heard repeatedly in Chittenden County whose call sounds like the name "Dorito." Dorito, Dorito, Dorito. Have you ever been walking down the street, minding your own business, when some bird started screaming about tortilla chips? One Seven Days reader had that very experience - kind of. ![]()
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