Bob Zilly of Longmont, Colorado describes himself as a “casual and opportunistic” recordist. I’m excited to profile Bob in this post not only because he’s a terrifically nice guy, but also because I think his recording style and equipment will appeal to many readers who might like to get into audio recording in a relatively quick, easy, and inexpensive way.
A while back I mentioned my long-standing desire to post a list of things we don’t know about North American bird sounds, with an emphasis on the simple questions that amateur sound recordists could answer. I’ve finally decided to take a crack at it.
A true crime story from the bird world.
Today’s post is the promised follow-up to my post on the history of spectrograms. I want to explain some basic concepts of spectrographic analysis so that I can clear up some common misconceptions and explain why some things may not always look quite the way you expected.
David Sibley was gracious enough to reply to my recent post on Buff-collared Nightjar, first in a comment on my blog, then yesterday in a post on his own blog. I respond to him here with some thoughts on how I listen to bird sounds.
To understand the variation in the way spectrograms look (and why I call them “spectrograms” instead of “Sonagrams”), it’s useful to know a little bit about their history.
In which I point out what appears to be a 45-year old mistake in the ornithological literature.
Rich Hoyer has posted photos and spectrograms of an apparent Calypte x Archilochus hummingbird at his blog this morning. A morning’s investigation convinced me that the sound file he posted does indeed provide good evidence that the bird at his feeder could be a hybrid, probably the progeny of a Black-chinned Hummingbird and a Costa’s Hummingbird.
Some people have asked how I learned to record bird sounds. The answer is simple: in 2004, I took the Macaulay Library’s annual Nature Sound Recording Course in California. If you’re interested in learning about audio recording in nature, I can’t recommend this course more highly.
In the first two parts of this series we explored the “quank” calls, which are some of the most common vocalizations of the three populations, and the “fast songs.” Today we’ll investigate two more types of rapid-fire calls, the “rapid quanks” and the “hit-trills,” and then I’ll leave the subject of nuthatches alone for a little while!