Greetings... Bill Buskirk's recent post about moon watching for birds
reminded me that there's a neat set of recordings by Bill Evans and Michael
O'Brian called "Flight Calls of Migratory Birds," available on CDROM. There
are recordings and spectrograms for the flight calls of 211 species of
eastern North American landbirds. Evans also developed a monitoring method
in which migratory flight calls can be recorded at night through a VCR, then
the recordings are played through freeware software he developed, and the
"zeeps" and "peeps" are somehow matched up to individual species or species
groups by the software. Here's a link to some sample flight call recordings
and a brief interview with Evans:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/kalahari/migrating.html

This is Evans's website, where he explains how to make the homemade
microphone he and others use for recording calls. There's also information
on a dickcissel monitoring program in Texas that a number of school groups
took part in:
http://www.oldbird.org

A few years ago, I saw an episode of Ken Dial's "All Bird T.V." that used to
play on the Animal Planet network, in which Evans explained that he
developed the microphone setup he uses for bird call recordings after
visiting the recording pit at Grateful Dead concerts.

With advances in recording and song and call analyzing technology, I wonder
if the day will come when ornithologists and other field researchers will be
able to routinely identify individual birds and their offspring by their
songs over the course of single or multiple breeding seasons--Steve Pelikan
told me that you can, over the course of a season, track individual males.
Or if specific "dialects" or regional song and call differences could be
determined to the point where migrant birds might be assigned to specific
populations or subspecies groups based on song and call analysis? Imagine if
MAPS stations like those run by Dave and Jill Russell and Tim Tolford could
keep tabs on not only the birds they catch but the ones that "get away," or
how much more information on a given population of birds could be gathered
over multiple years through song analysis combined with point counts and/or
the "constant effort" mist-netting protocols of a MAPS project. I bet we'll
see this happen sometime, if it's not already happening somewhere. I've
never had an original thought in my life, so no doubt there are dozens of
ornithologists working on this right now.

There aren't yet as many people running around recording bird songs and
calls as there are photographing birds, but it seems to be a slowly growing
subgroup of bird enthusiasts. Locally, Steve Pelikan has made a lot of
recordings in the past few years, has begun some in-depth studies on at
least two different species, and has a webpage with some material on
Cincinnati-area Carolina chickadee calls and songs:
http://math.uc.edu/~pelikan/BirdSong/cach.html

He's got a fairly simple, portable recording system, and he gets good
results with it. I've seen him use the system in the field on a number of
occasions. It's cool to have, for instance, a recording of the first
Swainson's warbler I ever heard--and thanks to Steve, I do!

Take care,
---Mike Busam
West Chester