Figure 1. The figure shows two calls of the Large Elaenia, labeled c1 and c2. (In the background, calls of Vireo olivaceus, with labels v1, v2). Click for details of section A.

I heard this striking vocalization - a brief noise pulse, followed by a frequency sweep - many times during the rainy season 2008 in Reserva Ecológica Mãe-da-Lua. A nearly identical call can be found on the CD "Guia sonoro das aves do Brasil. I." by Jacques Vielliard, Track 24, and there are more examples on the internet site xeno-canto. The call might correspond to the "soft, melancholy cleeur" in the species account of Ridgely and Tudor 1994, though the initial noise pulse sounds nearly like a click, rather harsh and unmelancholy. E. spectabilis is morphologically similar to other Elaenias, and I did rely mainly on this vocalization to identify the species.

Fig. 2. Details of section A of fig. 1. This call consists of an initial noise pulse (label "n") of about 25 ms duration, followed by a tone (fundamental and harmonics) of 400-500 ms duration. The frequency of the tone initially rises (label "t1") and then slowly drops (label "t2"). The call is amplitude-modulated in an irregular fashion (waveform plot, fig. 2a).

The spectrogram was calculated with the Raven Pro software, using the default 512 samples for window size and DFT size, and 50% overlap (44.1 kHz sampling frequency). I have also tried window and DFT size of 64 samples and 0% overlap (spectrogram not shown), which gives better time resolution and less frequency resolution. This did not significantly alter the appearance of the initial click-like noise pulse.