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. [Read more]
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A true crime story from the bird world. [Read more] 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. [Read more] 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. [Read more] 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. [Read more] In which I point out what appears to be a 45-year old mistake in the ornithological literature. [Read more] 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. [Read more] 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. [Read more] 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! [Read more] Here in Colorado, we have both the “Rocky Mountain” and “Eastern” forms of the White-breasted Nuthatch, and I’ve heard a couple of people proclaim that any bird giving a rapid-fire series of calls is a Rocky Mountain individual, while any bird giving a single “yank” note is an Eastern. Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that. [Read more] |
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