In 2007, an odd-looking flycatcher set up a territory above a diversion dam along the Big Thompson River in Loveland, Colorado. “Smudgy,” as some of us called the hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, displayed song behavior even stranger than one might expect from a hybrid.
Apologies to all of you who have been trying to access the site for the past 5 days — Earbirding got hacked.
The title of this blog post is a little misleading – while both websites have warbler themed names, the real purpose of this blog is to announce two new nature sound resources.
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 by song.
Ken Irwin 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. 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.
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.
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.
While using just a basic program such as Raven Lite will be sufficient for many recordists, you may find yourself wishing you had a more versatile program for fine-tuning your recordings. If this is the case the one I recommend is Adobe Audition.
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. This post aims to provide an introduction to the different “types” and how to tell them apart.
Once you’ve come back from the field with a card full of new audio, renamed the files, and backed everything up, you may want to think about editing your sounds.