Mall of the Wild The cry of the common loon gets a lot of play in the movies. It is a sound I associate with wilderness -- large, pristine lakes where humans rarely intrude. In the movies, however, you can hear a loon almost anywhere. The determining factor is fog. A suburban scene with close-cut lawns, water sprinklers, sidewalks and kids riding bicycles is not good loon habitat, but add some fog and Hollywood will have loons crying from every direction.

Winter of My Discontent The scene in the television movie is cold and dismal. Snow blankets a dusk-shrouded landscape crossed by picturesque split-rail fences. A man and a woman embrace near the barn. Soon they are serenaded by the celestial, flutelike song of a hermit thrush, which many people believe has the most beautiful voice of all North American birds. The thrush sang on and on, but all I could think was that in 25 years of listening to birds I've never heard a hermit thrush in winter. Where I live, the song of the hermit thrush echoes through deep woods in spring and summer only. So much for willing suspension of disbelief.

The Time Is Out of Joint The cardinal figures prominently in Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow." During the opening credits, Johnny Depp, playing "constable" Ichabod Crane, releases a caged cardinal as he prepares for an extended visit to the Hudson Valley. In a romantic scene with Depp in the Sleepy Hollow countryside, Christina Ricci (as Katrina Van Tassel) identifies a wild cardinal by its song. Cardinals were once kept as pets (now an illegal practice), but the ornithological record suggests that a cardinal would not have ordinarily occurred in this film's setting: the New York of 1799.

Historically a Southern species, the cardinal has spread north into New York -- where it is now common -- mainly within the past 60 years, probably aided by the proliferation of backyard bird feeders. Bird ranges change over time, another natural fact that is often lost on Hollywood. Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," by the way, never mentions the cardinal.

Silent Spring It's a beautiful spring morning on film. The sun rises above the hilltops. Warm light streams over the scene. Flowers are in bloom, trees are leafing out, the meadow is a lush green and the birds are ... mute. The actors populate a world devoid of the wild melodies of seasonal renewal and no one has told the sound editor. It's Rachel Carson's nightmare come true.

Birding Hot Spots of Hollywood The converse of the silent-spring technique: In some movies, sound editors go wild over bird songs. To every outdoor scene they attach a litany of singing birds and you never hear the same one twice. In recording the soundtrack, they seem to have turned on the bird-song tape and left the room. If such a place really existed, birdwatchers across America would flock to it. The actors, of course, never notice anything unusual as one bird species after another visits their idyllic hamlet, reciting its sweet strain.

Recently I saw a movie that used the birding-hot-spot style of sound recording to heighten suspense in a night scene. In quick succession I heard several species of owls, chuck-will's-widow, whippoorwill and the omnipresent common loon. Not only did every nocturnal bird of North America happen to occur in this movie location, each species sang on cue without stepping on another bird's lines.

Watching a movie with a few family members, I couldn't help pointing out another bird-song error. "Hear that blue jay? Totally wrong. That bird isn't found where this film is set!"

They shushed me with polite smiles and blank stares, only making the movie that much more unbearable. Had I been alone, I could have muted the annoying sound and read the closed captioning. Instead I brooded silently through the rest of the film, dreaming of the day when Hollywood adds "bird-song specialist" to its roster of technical advisors.

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