A question was asked during last week’s discussion on sound recording about why
birders should make more effort recording calls. Here are two examples that
come
to my mind of where more call recordings could impact on our knowledge of
Australian bird taxonomy.
First, the lurida race of boobook. At least one recent publications [Owls of
the
World 2nd edition by Koenig and Weick] treats this as a separate species. Yet
the
fieldwork that could establish whether this is the case has not been done in
Australia. Sound is a part of this – the majority of changes in owl taxonomy
in
recent years have been based on calls. How many recorded calls are there of
lurida
boobooks to use as part of a taxonomic review? As far as I know, just two, one
by
Dave Stewart and one by Fred van Gessel. If anyone else is aware of other
recordings, please let me know. Of course for such recordings to be useful it
would be necessary to see (and ideally photograph) the calling bird as it is
necessary to confirm the recording is really of lurida. Also it should be
noted
that calls don’t seem to vary as much between species in the Ninox genus as
they do
in some other owl groups.
Second, Cicadabirds. The possibility of there being two species of Cicadabird
in
Australia has been discussed for a while [e.g. Glenn Holmes, The Bird Observer,
801; 12 (1999)]. While it has recently been suggested that this won’t be
resolved
properly without additional collecting of specimens [L. Jospeh, Emu 111(3) p.
iii],
given that calls are a significant part of the puzzle, more progress could be
made
if a lot of recordings were available to analyse. If a sufficiently large
sample
proved that certain call types were only heard in rainforest habitat and others
only in dryer woodland then it would tend to support there being two species.
I recommend www.earbirding.com as it has a lot of posts on calls of American
birds
and shows the sort of information that can be obtained from sound recording.
For
example, the calls of a recent vagrant sparrow were compared to recordings from
various locations to see if the bird was from a migratory or resident
population,
which was relevant to the chance of it being an escapee. There are also some
recommendations on equipment (see the equipment tab on the right side of the
page).
Murray Lord
Sydney
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