Night Birding

First page of Diana Doyle's story in the current issue of  Birding Magazine.

How about birdwatching at night?  I never thought of it until I read Diana Doyle’s latest “Tools of the Trade” article (“NFC [Nocturnal Flight Calls] 101:  Birding for (Geeky) Insomniacs”) in the July/August 2014 issue of the American Birding Association’s Birding magazine.

Doyle describes a way of identifying bird sounds at night by recording them and then using software to turn them into identifying spectrograms.   She says that “All it takes is to adapt items you probably already own, such as a smartphone or digital recorder, and a laptop, with a couple of low-cost or free resources.”

There is an option to supplement the smartphone recorder with an external mic such as Edutige's EIM-003 mic for an iPhone, at $47, or the ESM-010 S-Microphone for Samsung.   Doyle cites the RODE Rec recording app for smartphones.

Two years ago, Birding editor Ted Floyd wrote a blog on his success with a compact Olympus recorder.  He also wrote a new online review and tutorial ("How to Record Birdsong").

After recording, you create a spectrogram from a short snippet of each different flight call using software for your computer.  Doyle cites two free software programs:  Audacity and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Raven Lite.

She says that step one is to save the backyard recording to your computer, then, with Audacity or Raven Lite, transfer the file into a spectrogram.  For details using Audacity, see Floyd’s online tutorial.

Then you compare the spectrogram with those for known species shown on the "Flight Calls of Migratory Birds" CD.  Doyle cites other sound spectrogram sources for comparison, including the iBird smartphone app I mentioned briefly in my July 18, 2014 blog blog on the Merlin Bird ID app.

I’ve also written a previous blog mentioning the only other nocturnal birdwatching I’ve heard about:  Chandler (“Chan”) Robbins, the “Father of Modern Ornithology”,  told me how he and his wife have spent full moon evenings staying up all night using a telescope with a grid pattern to count the silhouettes of migratory birds passing the moon.

I think he said he counted about 250,000 birds in one night passing over his home in Laurel, Maryland.

Robbins had no way of identifying species from silhouettes.  But I’m wondering what would happen if someone set up a recorder while watching the moon?   The recording can’t take place all night because the files are so big.  Doyle instead suggests recording from a half hour to two hours at different times on different nights to catch more species.

I'm finding all of Doyle's regular articles in Birding to be great!