Nathan Pieplow – Page 10

According to the grapevine, the AOU Checklist Committee has voted to split Whip-poor-will into two species. This split has been long anticipated, as the eastern and southwestern forms breed a thousand miles apart in different habitats, show slight average differences in size and plumage, and (most importantly for this blog) sing slightly different songs.

One of the primary lines of evidence cited in the split proposal was the recent publication of a molecular phylogeny of the nightjars by Han et al. (2010). Among many other species, the study looked at the two populations of Whip-poor-will (the eastern vociferus group and the arizonae group of the Mexican highlands), along with their close relative the Dusky Nightjar of Costa Rica (Caprimulgus saturatus). The study says that the three taxa “form a group… but their inter-relationships remain unresolved. This suggests that these three taxa should be given equivalent taxonomic status.” In other words, they recommend either splitting the Whip-poor-will, or lumping it with Dusky Nightjar.

Evidently the committee preferred the former option. No word yet on what they chose for names, so I’ll call them “Eastern” and “Mexican” for now. Here is a sampling of the songs of both forms, plus the Dusky Nightjar for comparison:

"Eastern" Whip-poor-will, Madison County, AR, 4/26/2009. Recording by Andrew Spencer.

"Mexican" Whip-poor-will, Cochise County, AZ, date. — "Mexican" Whip-poor-will, Cochise County, AZ, 5/11/2009.

DuskyNightjar-McCallum — Dusky Nightjar, San Jose province, Costa Rica, March 2010. Recording by Arch McCallum.

The three song samples above progress through the taxa from north to south. Note how with each successive southward jump, the song elements become longer, more widely spaced (both within and between strophes), and burrier (more squiggly on the spectrogram). It’s clear that these three taxa are closely related, but it’s also easy to tell them apart, even by ear, primarily by speed and level of burriness. However, it seems to me that the Dusky Nightjar is more different from the two North American forms than they are from one another; in addition to being much slower, it is also significantly higher-pitched.

Note that if the AOU accepts the recommendations of Han et al. when it comes to splitting genera, then the whole Whip-poor-will group (along with Chuck-will’s-widow, Buff-collared Nightjar, and possibly Common Poorwill) will be moved from the genus Caprimulgus into Antrostomus — but no such proposal is currently before the committee as far as I know.

http://www.xeno-canto.org/embed.php?XC=33593&simple=1

Song of Smudgy

8 May 2010 Nathan Pieplow

Loveland_hybrid_RHopper — "Smudgy," the first documented hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, Larimer County, CO, 4/26/2007. Photo by Rachel Hopper; used with permission. Click to enlarge.

In 2007, an odd-looking flycatcher set up a territory above a diversion dam along the Big Thompson River in Loveland, Colorado. It was clearly a phoebe, but what kind of phoebe, the first few observers couldn’t seem to decide.

Eventually, after puzzling over some internet photos of the smudgy-breasted bird, Nick Komar suggested that it could be a hybrid — one parent a Black Phoebe, the other an Eastern Phoebe. As soon as Nick’s suggestion landed in my email inbox, I knew I had to get sound recordings. For one thing, if it was truly a hybrid, then it was well worth documenting, because hybridization had never been reported among phoebes before. For another thing, I knew that a microphone trained on a hybrid flycatcher would open a unique window directly into the bird’s genetic code.

Why? Because unlike most other passerines, flycatchers don’t learn their songs. In a series of classic experiments in the 1980s, Donald Kroodsma raised Willow and Alder Flycatchers and Eastern Phoebes in the laboratory and determined that even if they were raised hearing only the wrong songs, or even if raised in complete silence, the birds all grew up to sing almost exactly like their parents.

This does not happen with most passerine birds. If you raise a finch or a junco without exposure to finch or junco songs, the bird might learn the wrong song, or it might grow up to sing incoherent babbles, but it definitely won’t sing like “normal” wild members of its species. Most birds with complex songs need tutoring and time to learn them — but not flycatchers. Every part of their vocal repertoire is somehow coded in their genes. Which means that if the genes of two species were to mix, one would expect to hear some sort of hybrid song.

Here’s what a normal Eastern Phoebe sounds like:

EAPHs-NDP2008-11-04 — Eastern Phoebe song, McCurtain County, OK, 3/22/2008.

And here’s a normal Black Phoebe:

BLPHs-NDP2009-08-06 — Black Phoebe song, Humboldt County, CA, 3/27/2009.

Birds with innate songs don’t usually show much geographic variation; they don’t have regional “dialects” the way that, for example, White-crowned Sparrows do. Therefore, in theory, Eastern Phoebes and Black Phoebes from all across their North American range should produce spectrograms that closely match the ones above.

That’s why, when I saw the spectrograms of the bird from Loveland, I knew we were dealing with a hybrid:

NDP2007-SmudgySong-5-2 — Song of hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, Larimer County, CO, 5/2/2007.

But “Smudgy,” as some of us called him, didn’t just mix up the pieces of Black and Eastern Phoebe songs. His song behavior was even stranger than one might expect from a hybrid.

For one thing, while Black and Eastern Phoebes both usually sing by alternating two different songtypes, Smudgy had three to choose from — like a Say’s Phoebe, the only species in the genus that had not given him genes. In addition, the introductory notes in Smudgy’s song were poorly stereotyped — that is, they weren’t always carbon copies of one another, but instead varied slightly with each delivery. However, the terminal portions of his songs were stereotyped. Furthermore, the different parts of Smudgy’s songs seemed to show different levels of influence from the parent species.

Why in the world would a hybrid sing like this? To know for sure, we’ll need more recordings of hybrid phoebes.

Hybrids appear to be on the increase, particularly in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, where the northeasterly range expansion of Black Phoebe has started bringing it into sympatry with the westward-surging Eastern — but an apparent Black × Say’s showed up in northern California, and it’s worth noting that “Smudgy” was found at least 150 miles outside the range of either of his parent species. Since hybridity may well scramble the migration genes as well as the song genes, a hybrid phoebe may be possible almost anywhere on the continent.

In Cañon City, Colorado, smack-dab in the center of the contact zone between Black and Eastern Phoebes, SeEtta Moss has begun finding her own hybrid phoebes. She recently posted photos [1 2] and a video clip of a definite hybrid, as well as photos of another possible hybrid (perhaps a backcross). Here’s the spectrogram of the definite hybrid (using the audio from her video clip):

SeEttaMoss_pBLPHxEAPH — Song of hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, Fremont County, CO, 4/9/2010. Audio from video by SeEtta Moss (click for link).

As you can see, this bird sings differently than Smudgy, which raises even more questions. As our sample of hybrid recordings grows, we may be able to discover some really fascinating things — not just about how genes control song, but also about how song evolved in these birds. More on that coming soon.

Back on the Air!

2 May 2010 Nathan Pieplow

falconry — Wrong sense of the word "hack," unfortunately. Photo by Angus Kirk (Creative Commons 2.0).

Apologies to all of you who have been trying to access the site for the past 5 days — Earbirding got hacked. (It was my own fault for not updating my installation of WordPress on a regular basis. Those of you who run WordPress blogs, let this be a lesson — always update on schedule!) As far as I can tell, the hack was only of a spam-link nature and it didn’t destroy any content — nor did it harm any visitor computers, as far as I know.

Most of the site is back online as of this morning, but certain links, iframes, etcetera may remain broken. If you find anything that isn’t working, please let me know.

Meanwhile, classes have ended for the semester and I’m now in the grading morass, but at least it’s a self-scheduled morass, and I hope to be bringing you some fine new content soon: upcoming blog topics include hybrid birds, hearing loss, Whip-poor-wills, Warbling Vireos, and annoying spectrograms.

Eastern & Western Marsh Wrens

16 April 2010 Nathan Pieplow

Eastern & Western Marsh Wrens sing slightly different songs, and may well be two different cryptic species. Many birders are aware of this in the vague sense, but haven’t taken the time to figure out how to tell the two forms apart.


Western Marsh Wren, Marin County, CA, 4/18/2009. Photo by Len Blumin (Creative Commons 2.0).	Eastern Marsh Wren, Rockingham County, NH, 5/2/2007. Photo by Scott A. Young (Creative Commons 2.0).

As the above photos show, identification by ear is going to be much easier than identification by eye — although these photos do nicely illustrate the slight average differences in crown color (browner in the west, blacker in the east).

So far, no one has reported any differences in the calls that the two Marsh Wrens make outside the breeding season, so this post will focus on songs. At first listen, the two forms can sound extremely similar. They both sing with the same pattern (that is, a couple of introductory notes followed by an unmusical trill):

Western Marsh Wren

Eastern Marsh Wren

Introductory notes

The easiest and most reliable way to separate the two forms is to listen to the introductory notes. The introductory notes of Western Marsh Wrens almost always consist of two quick, low, noisy “tuk” sounds. The second “tuk” usually runs right up against the start of the trill: “tuk tukRRRRRRRRRR.” Eastern Marsh Wrens, by contrast, very often start with a single nasal and/or buzzy note, which might be transliterated as “beer” or “bzt.” Listen for the difference in the songs above.

Some Eastern birds sing more complex introductions, giving 2-4 different kinds of introductory notes before the trill. Some of them — particularly in the far eastern part of their range, and especially coastal birds — can include so many different kinds of introductory notes that the overall impression is of a half-second warble preceding the final trill. They also frequently include some of these notes after the trill. Here’s a great example from upstate New York.

In another example from Florida, the bird goes crazy with high-pitched frantic warbles both before and after the trill; they may sound like distant fighting Killdeers, but they’re all Marsh Wren notes.

Tone quality

The tone quality of trills provides another important distinction. Western birds sing mostly noisy, unmusical notes, almost all of which sound like they could have been made by a typewriter or a stock ticker. The trills of an Eastern bird, meanwhile, tend to be more musical, although it’s a stretch to apply the word “musical” even to an Eastern Marsh Wren, since, at their loveliest, their trills tend to sound like someone rapidly shaking a fistful of coins. Nevertheless, listen closely to an Eastern trill for semi-musical “clinking” sounds or “piping” notes mixed in with other kinds of sounds.

Repertoire size

Both Eastern and Western Marsh Wrens sing with a repertoire of multiple song types, and they almost never sing the same song type twice in a row, preferring instead to cycle through almost their entire repertoire before repeating. According to Kroodsma & Verner (1997), Western males sing far more song types (100-200) than do Eastern males (40-60), but don’t bother trying to count them; instead, listen to the quality and complexity of the introductory notes and the trill.

Those familiar with Sedge Wrens may notice that Western Marsh Wren songs can be quite similar to songs of Sedge Wren, while Eastern Marsh Wren songs are less similar. However, Sedge Wrens can often be distinguished by their tendency to repeat one song type over and over again before switching to another. Unlike Marsh Wrens, they only cycle through their repertoires when excited, “during the dawn hour or during intense countersinging” (BNA). Here’s a Sedge Wren for comparison:

New Crossbill Compendium

9 April 2010 Nathan Pieplow

Red Crossbill, type unknown. Larimer County, CO. Photo by Andrew Spencer

Ken Irwin is a household name — at least among the bedlamites who think untangling the mysteries of Red Crossbill call types is a fun and worthwhile activity. Ken has haunted the seaside spruces of California’s Patricks Point State Park for years, tracking the Red Crossbills that wander in and out of the park, recording their vocalizations, capturing and measuring them, and following their nesting cycles. According to a couple of people I talked to, he may know the individual birds by name, and rumor has it that he is close to being accepted among the crossbills as an adopted member of their tribe.

Ken is best known for discovering a new call type (Type 10), and his paper describing it is coming out in the next issue of Western Birds (which, incidentally, will also include an article on phoebe vocalizations by Arch McCallum and me — more on that later). When I talked to Ken on the phone last year, he was also hard at work on a website that would include sound files of all the types, their excitement calls, their begging calls, their songs, etcetera.

Now that website is up, and everyone interested in crossbills should go see it. It’s a work in progress — but even in its current form, at about 14,000 words, it’s more than a little overwhelming. Nevertheless I recommend girding your loins and wading in. Irwin’s site is the most important addition to the web-based crossbill literature in years.

The recordings are probably the most important contribution made by the site, and they are both good and bad. Here’s the good news:

there are a lot of them;
they put Type 6 and Type 7 on the web for the first time (outside Jeff Groth’s original site from 1996, where all the recordings are so short and so heavily edited that they don’t really count in my opinion);
there are several nice head-to-head comparisons of different types;
most of them include lots of examples of individual birds, so that you can quickly get a strong sense of the limits of individual variation within the types;
they include many recordings of lesser-known vocalizations like excitement calls or “toops”, chitter calls, and songs.

Here are some things I liked less about the site:

The organization is confusing, and it got more so as the page went on. The information on this one page should have been split onto several linked pages, and was apparently intended to be. This may improve with future revisions.
Personally, I feel that Irwin’s word descriptions of the different calls are uneven in quality and ultimately unsuccessful, but then I have this reaction to most word descriptions of crossbill calls.
The recordings have been a little too heavily edited for my taste, so that the birds sound too mechanical, not quite like they would in the field. Since Irwin typically includes 2-3 calls per individual bird, the overall effect is much better than that of Jeff Groth’s site, but if he had included longer cuts with less editing, I think his recordings could have been even more useful.
The spectrograms are full-contrast — bicolored black-and-white instead of grayscale — and therefore less informative than they should be.

When it comes to the science — the validity of Type 10 in general, Irwin’s boundaries for Type 10, and his conclusions regarding crossbill song — I’m going to have to postpone judgment for a while. When I see his Western Birds paper, I’ll post again. Until then, when you’ve got a little free time and extra brainpower, head over to his page and start the long process of digesting the enormous amount of information that he’s published — and thank him for it if you get the chance.

Book Review: A Sound Like Water Dripping

3 April 2010 Nathan Pieplow

by Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, Gaspereau Press, 2009. Cover image from Cape Breton Regional Library (click for link).

A Sound Like Water Dripping: In Search of the Boreal Owl is the 2009 memoir of Canadian researcher Soren Bondrup-Neilsen’s research for his master’s thesis on one of the most elusive of North American birds. Born in Denmark, Bondrup-Nielsen spent the first few years of the 1970’s traipsing around the boreal forest of northern Ontario and northern Alberta, making some of the first audio recordings and nest observations of the Boreal Owl in the New World. Naturally, this involved lots of snowshoeing, skiing, camping, and hiking in remote forests in the dead of night at temperatures far below freezing, in areas frequented by wild animals and some equally wild humans, so as you might expect, there’s lots of material for a memoir.

I came upon this book while I was doing research for a blog post on the vocalizations of Boreal Owls. Bondrup-Nielsen was the first researcher to publish on the vocalizations of the species in North America, and we still owe a great deal of what we know about the species to his groundbreaking findings. As I expected, this book didn’t add any nitty-gritty details of Boreal Owl ecology to Bondrup-Nielsen’s published scholarly works, but it certainly adds a great deal of adventure, humor, local color, and historical context.

My favorite parts of the book were Bondrup-Nielsen’s adventures alone in the backcountry, searching for and finding the elusive owls. Besides the frigid temperatures, he suffered many other unexpected setbacks, from running into a moose (literally) to, unfortunately, losing two of the owls he had fitted with radio transmitters, possibly because of the transmitters themselves. In one case, feeling guilty that he had likely caused the death of a male owl who had fledglings to feed, he collected the three owlets from the nest after the widowed female abandoned them and found a bird rehabilitator to raise them. Stories like these underlie a great deal of biological field research, but are rarely told in the scientific literature.

Between bird backstories, Bondrup-Nielsen takes us into the culture of the logging camps where he lodged and sometimes worked, in the company of a colorful cast of characters with whom he got along sometimes better, sometimes worse. If I were to ask for one improvement in the book, it would be an expansion of the human character sketches, which capture my imagination but frequently leave me wanting more.

The book won a prize for its layout and design, which are simple but attractive; the black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the book help bring the story to life. Overall, the book is a quick read and a good one, especially if you yourself happen to be enthralled with the idea of wandering around in a dark boreal forest, waiting for that ethereal sound that the natives of northeast Canada likened to the sound of dripping water — the sound that (trust me) can instantly transform a tired, cold, exhausting, discouraging experience into a sublime, transcendent, unforgettable one:

Happy owling!

AOU Checklist News!

26 March 2010 Nathan Pieplow

The North American Checklist Committee of the American Ornithologists’ Union has published the results of its deliberations on the first round of proposed changes from 2009, and it has updated the slate of proposals currently under consideration. Here’s a quick summary of the changes that affect species splits north of Mexico. (I won’t get into all the changes to scientific names, even though those topics are just as interesting in my opinion — you can click through to read about those yourself.)

Proposal accepted

This split will become official once the next checklist supplement is published in the July 2010 issue of the Auk.

Split Pacific Wren from Winter Wren. As I reported earlier, this split did indeed pass, and unanimously at that. However, note that the names “Pacific Wren” and “Winter Wren” are not final. The committee is considering an addendum to the proposal that would split eastern North American birds from Eurasian birds and change the names of the American species to “Western Winter-Wren” and “Eastern Winter-Wren.” Stay tuned.

Proposals rejected

In most cases, a 2/3 vote of the committee is required for a proposal to pass. These proposals failed to muster that level of support:

South Hills Crossbill. The proposal to split South Hills Crossbill (Type 9) from Red Crossbill failed on a vote of 6 “yes” votes to 5 “no” votes, with three of the “no” voters indicating that they would be open to changing their minds if presented with more data. Two of those voters preferred to deal with the North American Red Crossbill complex as a whole, rather than splitting one type at a time, piecemeal. Thus, most of the committee appears to accept that the different call types of Red Crossbill are likely good species, but I think it may be a while before those species appear in your field guide.
The split of Western Scrub-Jay. The proposal to split the interior “Woodhouse’s” Scrub-Jay (woodhousei) from “California” Scrub-Jay (nominate californica) failed on a vote of 7 “yes” votes to 5 “no” votes. Many members of the committee felt that more data were needed from contact zones. The tagalong proposal to split the southern Mexican subspecies sumichrasti into yet a third species gained even less committee support. Vocal differences between woodhousei and californica have been reported, and you can expect those differences to be discussed in a future post on this blog.

New proposals

The checklist committee never sleeps. The following splits of North American species are now under consideration:

Split Black Scoter (Melanitta americana) from Common Scoter (Melanitta nigra). I wrote about this split recently. This proposal was originally submitted in 2006 and failed to pass at that time, but the recent publication of Sangster (2009) has revived it. Personally, I think it’s a clear-cut split, but we’ll see if the committee agrees.
Split Curve-billed Thrasher (Toxostoma curvirostre) into two species: the western palmeri group and eastern curvirostre group. The proposal makes no recommendation regarding the resulting English names. The proposal cites various genetic data, which I won’t comment on, but it also cites vocal differences, including differences in calls. I’m a little skeptical of these differences, but I’ll investigate them in the future and report back on what I find.
Split Whip-poor-will (Caprimulgus vociferus) into a nominate eastern species and the southwestern arizonae species, on the basis of subtle but easily diagnosable differences in song, differences in egg coloration, and (most importantly) a hot-off-the-presses study demonstrating that the vociferus and arizonae groups may be as genetically distinct from one another as either is from the Dusky Nightjar (C. saturatus) of Costa Rica and Panama. I haven’t been able to track down the article text yet, so I can’t say what I think of it.

As you can see, vocal differences are playing an ever-more-prominent role in taxonomic decisions. Look for more on this topic from me in the future.

Evening Grosbeak Call Types

21 March 2010 Nathan Pieplow

Evening Grosbeak, Soda Springs, CA, 8/3/2009. Photo by C.V. Vick (Creative Commons 2.0).

In 2004, a paper appeared in the Condor by Kendra Sewall, Rodd Kelsey and Tom Hahn that described several different variants of flight calls in the Evening Grosbeak. Their fascinating research immediately reminded many of the work on the call types of Red Crossbill, and I heard a few people worry out loud about whether a split of Evening Grosbeak might be in the works.

But there’s no cause for worry. The “call types” of Evening Grosbeak are not as scary as the call types of Red Crossbill. While Red Crossbills sort into at least 10 call types in North America, Evening Grosbeaks apparently sort into just 5. And while multiple Red Crossbill call types often occur in one area (which is part of the justification for splitting them into separate species), the Evening Grosbeak call types usually stay in fairly well-defined, separate geographic ranges. In fact, Sewall et al. note that the five call type groups seem to match the five subspecies groups in a decades-old taxonomy.

Learning to identify Evening Grosbeak call types is a fascinating exercise, especially if you come upon a wandering flock and want to know where they likely originated. This post aims to provide an introduction to the different “types” and how to tell them apart.

“Flight calls” vs. “Trills”

The terminology used by Sewall et al. (2004) as well as the BNA account of Evening Grosbeak distinguishes two main calls that are typically heard from the species: “flight calls” and “trills.” Neither source mentions how the “trills” may vary among groups; this post is going to concern itself solely with the flight calls, which are the most common vocalizations.

Type 1

Range: The northern Rockies and the Cascades, from at least British Columbia south to Oregon, northern Wyoming, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Wanders to the northern Sierra Nevada and to Colorado.

Flight call:

Even though the spectrogram shows that it tends to start at a higher frequency than other types, Type 1 sounds relatively low-pitched, especially compared to Types 2 and 4. It has a very clear sound that is distinctive once you learn it. More than the other types, this one reminds me of a particular Pine Siskin call (but beware! Pine Siskins can mimic other Evening Grosbeak types in their songs). Here’s another good recording of Type 1.

Type 2

Range: The Sierra Nevada of California; wanders at least occasionally north to southern Washington.

Flight call:

To my ear, this sounds like the clearest, most purely whistled type, even clearer than Type 1, but it is distinctly higher-pitched and more piercing than Type 1. Type 2 is quite similar to Type 4 and the two may be difficult to distinguish by ear in the field (see below).

Type 3

Range: Boreal forests of Canada east of the Rockies and in the northeastern United States. Wanders south throughout the East.

Flight call:

The distinctive Type 3 differs from Types 1, 2, and 4 by being slightly longer and lower-pitched and distinctly burry. Field guides with an eastern focus have often compared the calls of Evening Grosbeak to certain vocalizations of House Sparrow, and Type 3 is the reason why.

Type 4

Range: The southern Rockies (Colorado and New Mexico), occasionally wandering north at least to the vicinity of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Flight call:

The high-pitched and piercing Type 4 flight calls are most similar to Type 2 flight calls, both on the spectrogram and to the ear, but slighty huskier and less clear. I’m not certain I could tell them apart in the field with confidence, but the two have never yet been recorded in each others’ range to my knowledge. Here’s another recording of Type 4.

Type 5

Range: The Sierra Madre of Mexico, north to southeastern Arizona.

Flight call: To my knowledge, only one recording of this type has been made, and here it is:

Evening Grosbeak Type 5 flight call, Arizona. Recording by Rich Hoyer (used here with permission). — Evening Grosbeak Type 5 flight call, Cochise County, AZ, 4/14/1999. Recording by Rich Hoyer (used here with permission).

If this recording is typical, then Type 5 is distinctive: even longer and burrier than Type 3, but high-pitched like Types 2 and 4. If I had to guess, I’d say that the doubled rhythm is probably due to the whim of this individual bird, not characteristic of Type 5 in general, but who knows? — maybe Type 5 is the Mountain Pygmy-Owl of Evening Grosbeaks. If you have any recordings of Evening Grosbeak from Arizona or Mexico (or you know someone who does), please let me know!

Regions of Mystery

There are some places where we don’t really know which type to expect:

Southwest Oregon and northern California: Types 1 and 2 have both been recorded in this region, and the actual limits of their distribution here are poorly known.
Black Hills of South Dakota: The one recording I have is of Type 1, but I think Type 3 might also be likely, and Type 4 might wander in.
Arizona: My guess would be that Type 4 is most common in the northern and central parts of the state, while Type 5 is the most likely type to be encountered in the southeastern mountains, but we need more data.

You know what that means: more recordings necessary!

How to Manage Your Recordings

13 March 2010 Nathan Pieplow

If you are getting into nature sound recording, I’ve got a few recommendations for how to manage your recordings as the number of files grows.

Storage

The first thing you need to do is dedicate a storage space either on your computer’s hard drive or on an external hard drive. Unless you’re recording in MP3 format, which doesn’t take up much space, I recommend the external drive. Memory is getting cheaper and cheaper — I just purchased 300 gigabytes for $75 — so it shouldn’t break the bank.

Once you’ve got the drive, you need to decide on a filing system. Personally, I prefer to put all the original (unedited) recordings in a single dedicated folder where they will sort chronologically by filename (see below), but if you prefer to split things up into multiple folders, more power to you. Regardless, I strongly recommend keeping your original files separate from your edited files — the original files should reside in an “inviolate library” from which all else issues.

Filenames

Once you’ve got a place to put your files, make sure you rename them so that you know which one is which. Don’t let them sit around telling you “Scene_162.wav” or “20100312_h13m24s42.wav”.

Good filenames must do the following:

Tell you about the contents of the file (even if only in code);
Never reduplicate or repeat each other.

In my opinion, good filenames should also:

Sort chronologically. Personally, I would never dream of sorting the original audio files by species. For one thing, many of my cuts include the vocalizations of two or three (or ten) different kinds of birds at once. For another thing, it’s frequently important to know the order in which the cuts were recorded on a particular day. Edited files are a different story; I sort those by species, but the originals need to be chronological.
Include information about species, date, and place (and maybe recorder and recordist while you’re at it). This can make for long filenames, so some people might prefer to keep that information in the master index (see below), but I find it very useful to put this information in filenames, which makes the files searchable in several programs.

Here’s a sample filename to show you a system like the one I use:

AJS-2008-06-24-t48-SWTHalarm_YBFLc-CoosCoNH.wav

which includes:

AJS: the initials of the recordist (Andrew J. Spencer);
2008-06-24: the date (in year-month-day format so that files will sort chronologically);
t48: a track number (so that all recordings made on the same day will sort chronologically);
SWTHalarm_YBFLc: notes on the vocalizations recorded (in this case, Swainson’s Thrush alarm calls and Yellow-bellied Flycatcher calls);
CoosCoNH: the location (Coos County, New Hampshire).

To make it feasible to rename dozens or hundreds of files at once, I suggest a batch renaming program. The one I use is called Siren. It’s not very intuitive for beginners, but I love it. Once you learn how to create filename expressions in Siren, you can rename hundreds or thousands of files according to the same pattern, and that pattern can automatically incorporate other parts of the current filename, the date/time the file was created or modified, metadata from the audio ID tags, an increasing series of numbers, or other nifty strings.

Using Siren, I can simultaneously rename a hundred recordings at once, instantly giving them all the recordist’s initials, the date, a unique track number, and a location. Then I can go through and listen to each file, manually adding the vocalization information. The last step takes some time, but twice as much time is saved when I’m looking for something I recorded last year!

Create a Master Index

Somewhere, you’ll need to keep a master list of all the sound files you’ve recorded, and you’ll need to keep it updated. Personally, I use a simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that includes more detailed information about each file than the filename can hold: it has columns for filename, date, species, location, recorder, microphone, backups (see below), and comments.

One nifty trick I learned from this webpage was how to add a “Print Directory Listing” option to my Windows right-click menu. Following the instructions on that page, I was able to set up my computer so that when I right-click on a folder, I can choose the option to create a text file with a listing of all the files in the folder. I can import this into Microsoft Excel at the drop of a hat, which makes updating my Master Index a breeze.

Back it up! Now!

Even if you follow none of the above advice, you absolutely must back up your files. I recommend backing them up to DVD because DVDs are relatively durable, portable and spacious. Believe me, investing in a DVD burner is totally worth it if your recording output is going to be measured in hours and gigs rather than minutes and megs.

When it comes to long-term audio archival, you’ll want to investigate other options, most of which are beyond the scope of this post. However, I will mention that you might want to consider donating your recordings to a research archive. That way, your recordings will be available to researchers in the future — including you, if disaster strikes your original data and your backups.

The largest American research audio archives for nature sounds are the Macaulay Library at Cornell University and the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at Ohio State University. Other institutions with significant archives include the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science and the Florida Museum of Natural History.

If you have other tips (or preferences) for managing large file libraries, please let me know!

Happy Merganser Day!

4 March 2010 Nathan Pieplow

It’s March 4th, and that means it’s time to wish you all a happy Merganser Day.

What is Merganser Day, you ask? It’s my own personal birding holiday. It commemorates one of the most important days in my life as a birder: March 4th, 1992.

Red-breasted Merganser, Keyport, New Jersey, January 2009. Photo by Harmonica Pete (Creative Commons 2.0). — Red-breasted Merganser, Keyport, NJ, 1/2009. Photo by Harmonica Pete (Creative Commons 2.0).

At the beginning of high school, I was already an obsessive birder, but not yet a good one. I had nearly memorized the field guide and was ready and eager to see all the birds it illustrated, but I had encountered few of them in real life. My backyard seemed to contain only the common birds — robins, Mourning Doves, Downy Woodpeckers, crows — and I was solidly convinced that Sioux Falls, South Dakota was inhabited by only about fifty species of birds and one serious birdwatcher: me.

My first hint to the contrary came at the start of 1991, when I discovered a book called The Birds of South Dakota on the shelves of the public library. It was full of sightings of outlandish exotic birds (Scarlet Tanagers! Rose-breasted Grosbeaks! Black-throated Green Warblers!) from right inside Sioux Falls, with dates and names of observers — lots of observers. I was electrified. It seemed I had a lot of catching up to do.

I started birding every day that spring — and lo and behold, birds appeared in the “empty” woods: Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Eastern Phoebes, Hermit Thrushes, Brown Creepers. In the month of May alone I found 20 lifers on walks from home. But still I was birding all by myself. I was intimidated by the thought of contacting the rest of the birding community, convinced they knew far more than I did and had seen many more birds. So for the next year it was just me and The Birds of South Dakota.

Then, on March 4th, 1992, I saw a bird that changed the game: a Red-breasted Merganser in Lincoln County. According to the book, I had beaten the earliest-ever spring sighting away from the Missouri River by almost three weeks. I decided it was time to tell someone — and that’s how I ended up getting involved with the South Dakota Ornithologists’ Union, the Sioux Falls Bird Club, the Christmas Bird Count, etcetera. In short, that merganser ended up marking my official entry into the birding community.

Hooded Merganser, Norman, OK, 10/1/08. Photo by Jerry Oldenettel (Creative Commons 2.0).

By complete coincidence, it was three years later to the day when I saw my lifer Hooded Merganser on a pond in Cochituate, Massachusetts, forever cementing March 4th as “Merganser Day” in my mind. Hooded Merganser remains my all-time favorite duck.

I have gone birding every March 4th since 1995, usually trying to find a merganser if I can. In 1997 in Irkutsk, Russia it was Goosanders in the Angara River. In 1998 in western Massachusetts it was Common Mergansers on the Hoosic. The last few years in Colorado I’ve found all three species with ease, but in 1999 in South Dakota I had trouble finding open water and had to settle for a Wood Duck at somebody’s farmhouse water fixture.

This morning, for a change of pace, I decided not to chase after ducks. Instead I sought out a pair of White-winged Crossbills in Fort Collins, which satisfied the birding bug quite nicely, thank you.

I know this post has been low on bird sounds so far, so here’s a link to Russ Wigh’s recording of the wonderful growling display of Hooded Merganser to tide you over. There will be more bird sounds coming just as soon as I can figure out how to fix the unfortunate bug on my computer that isn’t letting me listen to or edit my old recordings at the moment. Sigh….