Using a Recording Device for Bird Identification By Ear

Video Transcript

"Hello, welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield. We're going to be talking about birding by ear. Well we've mentioned already the fact that there are three principle components to using bird song to your advantage, but before we get into the techniques and specifics of other equipment, let's just think about our ears and our ability to tune into what birds are saying. Once somebody becomes an attuned listener, television programs, movies and every experience outdoor is something that is studded with bird vocalizations whether they be songs or calls of various sorts. They're things that we can begin to pick up on and learn and appreciate and use as identification aids. Now in addition to our own ears, needless to say there are various technological pieces of equipment that can be brought to bare. Certainly one of the favorites and long standing is the tape recorder and in front of me here I have a Sony tape recorder. This is certainly not a state of the art piece of equipment, but it's something that for many years has served me very well in terms of allowing me to listen to bird songs and actually take it into the field and potentially record bird songs as well. Increasingly with the digital age, there are such things as iPods and palm pilots, all of which can be variously loaded with prerecorded sounds and can be used for study purposes or can be used as a way to sort of double check whether your identification of something in the field is appropriate. Or in some cases they even come with small speakers, so that you could play a song of the wood thrush to a singing wood thrush and then in some cases actually draw that bird closer to you. But as I pointed out in an earlier segment, the use of tapes and playing them to singing birds is something that needs to be done discreetly, because remember that to a bird a digitized voice imitation of its own, is just like an intruding male of the same species and to that extent there is some level of disruption. So birders need to be careful and cautious in terms of their use of tapes with real birds. But certainly from a learning prospective, they're wonderful and there are lots of different commercially available CD's and tapes that can be used as well as resources on the internet that will give people catalogs of bird songs information."