Got Grosbeaks?
If Evening Grosbeak is a common sight at your feeders, Aaron Haiman wants to hear from you.
Humming Their Own Tune
The learning of complex songs isn’t restricted to the so-called “songbirds.” In fact, some of the best examples of learned, complex songs come from a source that may surprise you: the hummingbirds.
Automatic Song Recognition Online
Hermann Redies and the folks at Xeno-Canto have just launched an ambitious project called Pai-Luiz, which attempts to automatically identify recordings of unknown bird sounds by looking through the entire Xeno-Canto database for matching syllables.
What’s That Screeching?
Around this time of year, I tend to get a lot of questions from people who want to know what kind of bird might make frequent loud harsh screeches at dawn, at dusk, or in the middle of the night.
The Coolest Bird
Rich Levad’s book “The Coolest Bird” has been published online by the American Birding Association.
Spectrograms on the iPhone
An email from Denise Wight alerted me to the Spectrogram application for the iPhone, which is a pretty neat little app indeed. It uses the iPhone’s built-in microphone to create realtime scrolling spectrograms of any sound you’re hearing. Now those with hearing loss can see the sounds that their ears can’t hear!
The Genus Formerly Known as Aimophila
Recently I explored some of the recent AOU species splits by comparing birdsongs. Today I want to look at a genus that the AOU dramatically chopped and reshuffled: the sparrow genus Aimophila.
Rattles, Claps, & Burp-clicks
I am pleased to share with you a couple of cool recordings that may help resolve (or perhaps merely deepen) the mysteries surrounding the calls of the Buff-collared Nightjar.
The Changes Are In
It’s July, and that means it’s time for the annual update to the American Ornithologists’ Union Checklist. Besides the high-profile splits of Winter Wren, Whip-poor-will, and Black Scoter, the checklist committee also did some major rearranging of scientific names, splitting a number of genera and reassigning several species to a new genus. We’ll take a quick survey of what’s changed and how audio was involved.
Swift Travels
Last fall I posted about the project to put geolocators on Black Swifts in an effort to determine, for the first time, where the species spends the months from October to May. I just got exciting news from Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory’s Jason Beason: on Wednesday night, the team succeeded in recapturing one of the birds wearing a geolocator!