Perspectance

Coming into the birding class, I had a goal of learning more about bird voices. I do have an iPod and recorder that attaches to the bottom. It’s been great for meetings, speakers, and singing, so I started “capturing” bird sounds with it. I had dozens collected before I first sat down to import the .wav files to my desktop pc. Listening to them played back was a huge disappointment – all white noise and wind, my loud bumps, cars and dogs, and the faintest of bird noises. So, I set another target to learn how to edit these files.

I could (and probably will) write for a couple of hours about the learning process, but our final class is tonight and I want to have something for people to see and hear.

We saw and heard this striking red, white and black woodpecker recently on a hike up to Olympic Hot Springs. Doug focused on taking pictures, and I recorded it’s sound.

The image below shows what the woodpecker sound looked like in Audacity after extracting it from the surrounding noise. There are three distinct areas that show up in the graph.

Neither the graph nor the sound really matches Cornell’s Ornithology library sound for a red-headed woodpecker. I’m not sure now what I saw or heard.

NOTE: Here I am in class and a classmate just showed a slideshow. I think the picture of a red-breasted sapsucker looked like what I saw. Sure enough, back at the Cornell site, a sound match is confirmed.

While taking the Birding class during October and November, I went out many times to observe birds. I usually took binoculars, a notepad and pencil, and some bird identification books. I’ve always been frustrated not being able to see birds well enough to tell what they are, so on these trips, I was also excited to take along my iPod recorder to try and identify the birds by their sound. The whole sound project was a learning experience, but did not contribute as much to identifying birds.

Thankfully, two or three times Doug came with me, bringing his Nikon D60 camera with something like 6 or 7 megapixels and a big 200mm telephoto lens. I was amazed how much detail we could observe by zooming in after loading the pictures on the computer and into a photo editing program. As I looked up the kinds of birds I thought we had seen, sometimes I would realize the evidence pointed to a different species. This slide show is built to show the naked eye and sometimes binocular view contrasted with a zoom and crop on the computer.