How to sing like a Bewick's Wren? Practice!

A juvenile Bewick's Wren was "babbling" in the backyard today, singing a few notes of one song, then a few notes of another, interspersing them with random wrenish buzzes and trills. He's learning the songs of the local adults and that's quite a job, since an adult typically sings more than 15 songs. These songs vary by geographical region, with different "dialects" recognized in the Eastern, Western, and Southern US. I've recorded nearly a dozen of the local songs and you can hear them on my Bewick's Wren page. I'm so enamored with these songs that I use one as the ringtone for my cell phone.

Smithsonian Magazine has a great article about the book "A Singing Life of Birds", which describes this "babbling" behavior of juvenile Bewick's Wrens.