The second installment in our occasional profile series spotlights Tayler Brooks of Brier, Washington, a newly active young recordist who was one of the expert sound ID panelists at the recent Western Field Ornithologists conference in Boise.
Like other exotic species, parrots are woefully underrepresented in commercial bird sound publications. However, whether their immigration status is legal or not, exotic birds are unquestionably here, and they are unquestionably making noise. And that presents us with a great opportunity.
Jason Beason just informed me of a brand new biweekly audio quiz set up by Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory at http://rmboquiz.blogspot.com. The RMBO quiz will be the only regular, moderated bird sound quiz on the web, as far as I can tell. There are certainly automated quizzes on the web — the Patuxent Bird Sound Quiz is fun — but I don’t know of any other blog-style audio quizzes whose challenges change on a regular basis.
Here are the answers to the quiz from the last post.
Last week I facilitated the Sound Identification Panel at the Western Field Ornithologists Conference, which is a wonderful privilege I have been treated to for each of the last four years. In front of a large live audience, I quizzed an expert panel on crossbill sounds. Can you meet the challenge of identifying the common western Red Crossbill call types?
The Labor Day weekend was a busy, sleepless one for me: I helped Ted Floyd lead a three-day workshop on nocturnal migration for the ABA’s Institute for Field Ornithology. Now I’m off to the Western Field Ornithologists Conference in Boise, Idaho.
In the opinion of the late Rich Levad, the Black Swift was The Coolest Bird, and in his still-unpublished manuscript of that name, he advanced a pretty strong argument for its coolness. This is a bird that spends much of its time foraging so high in the air that nobody ever sees it. It nests in the spray zone of waterfalls, so that a juvenile may never have dry feathers between hatching and fledging. And it is poorly understood: to this day we really have nothing but educated guesses as to where the species spends the winter.
It appears that will change soon.
Don Roberson of Creagrus fame sent me an interesting and provocative email in response to the old pygmy-owl vs. chipmunk thread (1 2). With his permission, I’m reproducing it here for discussion.
Last spring Chris Tessaglia-Hymes of Cornell University started a listserv devoted to the discussion of nocturnal migration. The listserv started off slow, but it has slowly gained participants (including, just recently, yours truly), and now that the southbound nocturnal migration is in full swing across North America, the postings are really picking up. This is a great opportunity to join (or just to listen in on) the national conversation about nocturnal flight calls.
In response to my last post, Paul Hurtado suggested that I periodically profile recordists and their equipment, as a service to beginners and those shopping for new gear. I loved the idea, and since it was his (and he volunteered), I’m starting with a profile of Paul himself.