You might not recognize, due to the relatively sedate background noise of this short recording, just how many cars are in this busy parking lot. This segment was recorded at an outdoor mall in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, where I was struck by the sheer volume, color, clarity, and — foremost — personality of the many birds in a group of short trees at the end of various lanes of parking spaces. If you situated yourself properly, you could focus on the pinging back and forth of a conversation — a squabble, perhaps, or the start of a scheme, more likely — unfolding just out of view. Inherent in the humor of the moment was that the birds did a good job of disguising themselves, virtually indistinguishable as they were from the brush in which they were ensconced. At first, the beeping of a car backing up seemed to violate the purity of their intraspecies communication, but when listening back to the recording, I couldn’t help but note how the beeping seemed to fit naturally amid the bird calls. The birds seemed to, at times, match the tone of the beeping, and at other times leave space for the beeping, so they could talk, as it were, around it. Which is to say: the birds seemed just as cognizant of and, for better and worse, inured to the vehicular noise as are the rest of us.
Photo is a detail of a larger image by Richard F. Lyon (aka Dicklyon on Wikipedia), used thanks to a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.