I took a dive into iPhone apps that produce spectrograms of recorded sound, with an interest in bird song (of course). I got into spectrograms looking at the figures in Handbook of Bird Biology. I’m mainly looking for something that I can match to Field Guide to Bird Sounds, with the thought that this could […]

Like anything else, learning bird songs takes practice and close attention. Here are some resources and my experiences that may help guide you. How I Learned Mnemonic/Sound Pattern Recognition: When I took ornithology in undergrad, we used Peterson’s Birding by Ear which groups songs by characteristics and thereby teaches you to listen for broad characteristics, […]

I’ve started a game on Twitter, running weekly with the hash tag: #namethatbirdsong Every Weds 12pm I’ll post a bird song, and you tweet your own original (or post for a friend with attribution) mnemonic device, that differs from the widely accepted mnemonics taught for the posted bird song (#altmnemonic) along with the game hash […]

Thanks to a conversation with my friend, Dr. Kaitlin Stack Whitney, over Twitter, I learned that there’s an entire field of study that is poised to look formally into some of the concepts that have been nebulously floating about in my mind about how we process bird songs. Most recently, I’ve been interested in mnemonics, […]

In these days of tech addiction, it seems always a struggle to balance how much I should use my iPhone! “Modern day birding” is no help. 🙂 In fact, it’s the main reason I can’t justify deleting social media from my phone. Ironically, an activity that otherwise immerses us in nature is wrapped up in […]

Today I fought my cold and went birding in the rain and 50’s°F to look for a Pacific loon reported in the morning. Unfortunately I didn’t find it, but I did find a red-necked grebe on the lake. I walked down to the beach next to the water treatment plant and looked for rocks. After the rain picked up, […]

I use Google Drive through google-drive-ocamlfuse because it has a native mount, so it looks/acts much like the folder you’d be accustomed to on Windows. However, it’s much slower to sync, so be aware of that (i.e. it doesn’t do what the Windows side does, which is to make a folder and sync on its […]

I’ve been slacking on blogging lately so here’s a quick rundown of the places we’ve been in search of fall colors this month! Temperance River state park Tettegouche state park: shovel point Palisade head Jay Cooke State Park white pine trail (1-4) C.C.C. trail (4 –> 1) Oldenburg overlook picnic trail overlook

We were breaking apart our region of interest to facilitate downloads, but I decided instead to let Google tile the image for me. Some things I noticed: even when providing a region for export, the extent is used as opposed to an actual “clip” of the image. However, when you clip the image earlier in […]

The 1st disc starts with a “dawn chorus” that is also a nice little quiz once you work your way through the CD’s! The credits mention that it is taken from an album for which I can’t track down an electronic recording, but it has been generated from more recordings than that, based on a […]