At 01:37 PM 9/20/02 -0400, you wrote:
>And if you ever managed to catch me giving my Pine Barrens Treefrog call
>you'd know just how little quality matters. Or listen to folks who call
>game birds.
>
>Walt
>
gobble, gobble, gobble. . . some quality!
A non-hunting friend (rare in New Hampshire) once commented that he thought
the turkey season was a wonderful invention: males of one species
imitating females of another, with the specific object to lure and kill
males of that second species. He said it kept the perverts off in the
woods and away from our own species.
cheers,
Marty Michener
MIST Software Associates
PO Box 269, Hollis, NH 03049
coming soon : EnjoyBirds - software that migrates with you.
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>From Tue Mar 8 18:22:44 2005
Message: 5
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 13:37:02 -0400
From: Walter Knapp <>
Subject: Re: Male and Female response to playback
I agree, especially about how much the environment degrades sound, but
what's interesting about this is that one of the repeated big arguments
about ATRAC is that it will ruin the quality of the sound so a animal
won't respond, because they are so much more discriminating than we are.
The sound hardly has to be perfect.
In some animals the difference between the males and females is
genetically locked in. The Coqui frogs, for instance, the males and
females have different frequency sensitivities and a single call from a
male contains both the territorial warning at one frequency and the
attraction for the female at a different frequency. So it's a entirely
different sounding call to each.
And if you ever managed to catch me giving my Pine Barrens Treefrog call
you'd know just how little quality matters. Or listen to folks who call
game birds.
Walt
Kevin J. Colver wrote:
> I seem to remember long ago a comment suggesting that birds responded to
> a recording, thus suggesting that the recording was of good quality.
> This brings up an interesting field of inquiry-what is the nature of
> avian response to the sounds they hear?
>
> A chapter in Catchpole and Slater's "Bird Song, Biological themes and
> variations" presents an interesting discussion on the topic. It appears
> that males and females have different discriminating tastes when it
> comes to song they hear.
>
> Females have all their reproductive eggs in one basket, so to speak,
> thus they are very careful and discriminating in listening and
> responding to song. They are more sensitive to poor quality and
> defective songers. It is important that they choose the best quality
> singer available. Males, on the other hand, need to chase off every
> rival including rookie singers and even imitators such as mockingbirds.
> Thus they will respond to almost anything that sounds even close to a
> conspecific song. I presume therefore that female response to playback
> would be a better indicator of the quality of the recording than would
> male response. (And this discussion will refer largely to songbirds,
> there is great variation among species even in this group.)
>
> The issue is further clouded by the fact that almost every song the
> birds hear in the wild is already degraded by distance and environmental
> factors. The birds are programmed to respond to degraded sound.
> Indeed, they can discriminate the degree and quality of song degradation
> to extract information on how far away and what direction the singer is
> located.
>
> Thus the fact that a bird responds to playback is only a very crude
> assay of the quality of a recording.
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