Hi Marty--
Some ID's take 50 years, others 5 minutes. Studs
Terkel calls it, "the perfect recording machine."
Comes as standard equipment in all new models.
Now if we had to remember something we heard
earlier this Spring,.. naw, I won't go there. ;-)
Rob D.
At 5:03 PM -0400 6/8/06, Marty Michener wrote:
>Recordists, Friends:
>
>I just received a two CD audio set from Macaulay Library on N. A. owls. It
>appears to be a very excellent product, and I have listened to it twice
>through. It was an experience that took me to many night-time woods and
>fields, and back just fifty years - - - <:-| All of those at several
>cooperating libraries, and you member contributors are to be congratulated=
,
>IMHO.
>
>But as you might know, when I arrived at 16 to visit Cornell first in the
>spring of 1956, I had brought tape recordings from PA I hoped to play for
>P. P. Kellogg. I had accurately identified most of the bird species,
>including a Blue Grosbeak, (which I have always claimed is what got my
>dyslexic ass into the school -- Allen and Kellogg then needed sounds from
>this species and still had some "pull" then).
>
>But one recording, made in my yard in Pennsylvania at night in early summe=
r
>was a puzzler. After recording with my home-made parabola from many hundre=
d
>yards away, I began searching the woods with a flashlight - modest by
>today's standards - homing on the occasional sound, and all I could ever
>see through my opera glasses was what looked like a very tall Screech Owl,
>but it was not doing any visible calling! My bird books were very
>rudimentary then, but I tentatively identified the bird as a Long-Eared
>Owl, even though the habitat -- an old Willow marshy area - was just all
>wrong. When I checked better sources the next day, the voice could not
>have been more wrong, so I decided to let the Ornithologists at Cornell
>figure it out. This sound was a high descending whistle. The Long-Eared Ow=
l
>hoots deeply.
>
>When, in 1956, I played this "cut" for PPK and Doc Allen, they demurred.
>They explained that the vocalizations of owls were many and varied, beside=
s
>the familiar ones usually associated with territorial and mating
>activities. No, they said, they didn't accept donations to their library
>without some fairly certain identification, and I could then and now easil=
y
>see why they held this policy. Still, I was disappointed they had no ideas
>about the owls that made this strange sound. We all then forgot about it.
>For fifty years.
>
>Well, yesterday it clicked. On disc 2 near the end there was that sound. I
>remembered it in an instant. I was very startled, since I wasn't listening
>for anything in particular, least of all this old memory. It was cut 83 on
>the second disc, tenth from the last. It is the begging call of fledgling
>Long-Eared Owls. And I don't even know on which, in my pile of dusty 1/4
>inch tapes, if any, the sound might still be! So, instead of driving to my
>45th college reunion today, I am posting these congratulations to the L of=
O.
>
>-- affectionately, Marty Michener
>MIST Software Assoc. Inc., P. O. Box 269, Hollis, NH 03049
>http://www.enjoybirds.com/
>
>"Science is really the art and patience of waiting a lifetime for the real
>answers to important questions." - MCM
>
>
>
>
>
>"Microphones are not ears,
>Loudspeakers are not birds,
>A listening room is not nature."
>Klas Strandberg
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
--
Rob Danielson
Peck School of the Arts
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/~type/audio-art-tech-gallery/
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