Hello NEOORN!
We have set up a new website for the identification of bird songs from
tropical America:
http://www.xeno-canto.org/
Its main aim is to collect recordings from Central and South America,
such that they can be used to help identification of recordings you
may have at home. The identification is done using easy
characteristics such as length of the song, number of notes, speed and
so on, but this may also be combined with habitat, elevation, country,
etc. (This is possible because The Chicago University Press has given
permission to use the databases by Parker et al (1996), that came with
"Neotropical birds: Ecology and conservation" (Stotz et al 1996).)
The idea is to quickly focus on a short list of species which have
songs similar to the one on your recording, and potentially present in
the place where you were recording.
Everyone is encouraged to submit recordings to increase the scope of
the collections. The ownership of these recordings remains with the
recordists, and it will always be able to remove them if they choose
to do so.
Note that at this moment the collection is still small, since we have
only combined our own recording libraries. There are some 160 species.
However, work is underway to also be able to search through ALL
species from the neotropics, by classifying sounds on published
CD(-ROM)s. The resulting search results may then be used to listen to
relevant bird songs in your own local library of CDs.
We hope that over time it will turn out to be a useful and enjoyable
resource, and we also hope that it will generate a bit of honest web
community effort. You're all invited to have a look around and
participate!
Cheers,
Bob Planque and Willem-Pier Vellinga.
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