At 01:19 PM 4/23/2003 -0400, Walter Knapp wrote:
>You might want to go read Tinbergen's experiments with herring gulls.
>Just how little of the details of the adult bird's head were necessary
>for the chick to recognize it. I'm sure the same thing applies to sound.
>Animal Ethology was a interesting course when I took it. You look into
>this sort of stuff there. That is the bottom line in Bioacoustics, what
>matters to the animals.
For some reason, some people like to treat animals' response to sound
(and everything else) as if it were an inflexible math equation. I haven't
heard yet of anyone trying to dissect Maria Callas' voice in this way. We all
understand there is a large psycho-acoustic component in human hearing - why
not in animals too?
Any birder can tell you that sometimes birds respond to calls of
closely-related species (I kept getting the wrong rockjumper answering tapes in
So Africa), and sometimes they don't respond to their own calls (sick? moody?
hiding?). I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for Cornell to prove that
ATRAC recordings don't function as well as 48/256 uncompressed laser-etched
titanium crystal recordings.
Tech is fun, but really, sometimes ......
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Chuck Bragg, Pacific Palisades, CA
Membership Chair
Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society:
http://smbas.cjb.net
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