Earbirding

This past weekend I made my annual field trip to the Western Field Ornithologists’ conference in Palm Desert, California. Unfortunately, I had little opportunity to get out and make recordings in the field – it was a particular shame to miss out on recording at the Salton Sea, where (if you find the right spot) the most disruptive background sound usually comes from other birds, not from humans or vehicles. However, I did get to use a microphone a little bit during the Field Sound Recording Workshop that I ran on Saturday morning. While demonstrating the use of a parabola for some of the workshop participants, I was able to record these interesting sounds from a nervous flock of Gambel’s Quail:

In preparation for the workshop I drew up a brief list of equipment recommendations for those who would like to get into sound recording. I had long hesitated to do this, because I’m really not a gearhead at all – I basically know just enough about audio recording equipment to use it properly. But requests for gear recommendations are probably the single most common question that I field, and I felt it would be of use to readers if I posted the resulting info to my blog.

So, from now on you’ll see a “Recording Gear” page among the links above. Besides the equipment recommendations, the real value of the page is probably the quick links to other online resources. Please let me know if you find it useful, or have anything to add or subtract!