First, I'd like to say hello! I've been lurking
for a while, but this is my first post to the
group. I've been an avid birder since March 2006.
I've had the hobby of photography since 1999, but
when I got really into birding photographs just
didn't seem like enough. So I bought a video camera and later a Telinga dis=
h.
I've had my Telinga PRO-5W Stereo-DAT since 26
July 2006. I haven't bought a recorder yet; I've
been using my digital video camera (Sony
HDR-HC1). Sometimes I just record pure audio,
with a lens cap on the camera (and I later
extract the audio track and delete the video).
But sometimes I record video while using the
Telinga for my audio... which can be very cool
indeed! It's wonderful to hear the crackling of
twigs as a bird walks around, and the fluttering
of its wings as it flies. Not to mention actual vocalizations!
Some of the most interesting audio I've gotten so
far: subsong from a Scrub Jay, from an Oregon
Junco, and from a White-crowned Sparrow. I've
also been working on collecting House Finch
songs; they fascinate me with their beauty,
complexity and variety =97 if I walk just half a
mile away they're singing a totally different set
of songs. Some of them are simple and melodic
enough that I can imitate them. I've been
studying them and mapping out the local dialects
(gradually, so far); there's much more I could
say (including audio samples, of course) but I'll save that for a later pos=
t.
Right now I have a pressing matter: there is a
singer I heard last Saturday at Malibu Creek
State Park (in southern California). My immediate
reaction was to pull out my Telinga and get a
recording. I was very close to the bird and he
was singing loudly, so even though some people
were talking nearby, it came out clearly enough
that I can see harmonics in the spectrogram going up as high as 22 kHz.
I adjusting the volume to avoid clipping, and got
several repetitions recorded. Nevertheless I very
narrowly avoided getting a recording without
clipping =97 it was such a close call that my
entire recording is clipped in the right channel!
Here is the left channel:
http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/AAYdRpIXLcD7PBD96_3hhXDmMJFTXLWVrZP0BUgRiwwVXz=
INm72jHRJY3URih8HAK6BFlzek6ZW5ZNIYM7VOeefjDnzWjyE/possible%20Pine%20Warbler=
%20singing.mp3
And here's a spectrogram:
http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/AAYdRs4wiez7PBD9aPpSvgnW1cPj7MoJNQOpA95KWTiEVC=
9mrB0JZvnxdYD71EGZefi9nBdfTR9WaYDVhpBPgFZnJWugmnM/possible%20Pine%20Warbler=
%20singing%20-%20spectrogram.png
Note, there are some warbler calls in the
recording. (I call them "ticks", but many other
sources call them "chips".) However, I think
they're from a different bird; I had my dish
point blank at the singer, so ticks coming from him should've been louder.
Posted is an mp3; the lossless version is
available on request (I use DV for my pure audio
recordings, so there's no lossy coding).
So then I used my eyes to see if I could find the
actual bird, using the direction the parabola was
pointed as a clue. To my surprise, he was perched in plain sight!
What I did next was foolish. I called over my
aunt Arlene (we were birdwatching at Malibu Creek
together) using the lowest volume voice I thought
she could hear, because I didn't want to be
greedy and hog the bird to myself. And yet, I was
greedy; I commenced to strap the dish in front of
me so that I could get video and good audio at
the same time. I should have simply tried to get
some kind of visual record of the bird as fast as
I could, strapping the dish behind me (which is quicker)!
The bird flew to a much more hidden spot before I
got any pictures or video. Before he did, I saw
him from the front. My impression was that he was
an all-yellow warbler, almost like a Yellow
Warbler except that he had no stripes on his
belly. As it turns out there is only one yellow
warbler that sings that song: the Pine Warbler.
The complicating matter thing is this: apparently
there is enough room for variation in
Orange-crowned Warbler songs (according to sound
samples at http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/BNA/, to
which I'm subscribed) that one could conceivably
be singing the same song. I don't normally
confuse orange with yellow, and I've never seen
an Orange-crowned Warbler that looked the
slightest bit like it was all-yellow, but I have
to allow the possibility that my perception was mistaken.
All the Orange-crowned Warblers I've heard here
in Los Angeles County have sounded quite
different from the bird in question; they have a
slower, less uniform song. But I'd never birded
in Malibu before, so I have to also allow the
possibility that over there, they might sing
rapid, uniform songs that suddenly drop in pitch
for the last few notes. Also, during the Malibu
Creek walk, I did not see any other warblers
besides Yellow-rumped, and although a couple
times I thought I heard an Orange-crowned Warbler
song (the kind familiar to me) it was distant and faint thus I wasn't sure.
So, what do you think? How likely is it that I
actually found a Pine Warbler, which is
incredibly rare here? Or was he an
Orange-crowned, his seeming yellowness a trick of the light?
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