Hi all, There is much fodder for discussion here, but I'll need to keep this brief - if I can, I'll reply at length to all the additional questions that Chris posed in a previous email in this vein, but it probably won't be until later in the weekend.
David, I am pleased to hear that you are using the SongMeter. Cornell has been working with Ian to develop a next generation "SongMeter" unit, called the SoundCache, which we are now using. It's a wonderful device, and it has many useful features as you mentioned. If any of you are using these, Mike, Anne, and I may be able to provide some useful suggestions about how to program the units, battery life, storage space, etc. I won't bore all of you with that now, but if there is interest, we can provide info! Re:detectors - there is precious little information available on the full range of behavior of the energy detectors available to us, but I know for certain that Powdermill Avian Research Center (Mike, Emma, Lewis, do you want to chime in here?) has worked recently on evaluating Raven, XBAT, and Oldbird-style detectors. Cornell has done some work on this as well. Some of these results have been presented at professional societies and my hope is that there will be a forthcoming manuscript or two on exactly this topic. There are differences among these different detectors, though that's a more time consuming email better saved for later. More on this thread later - no doubt others will chime in as well! Best, Andrew On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 17:28, David Martin<[email protected]> wrote: > I'm going to be very interested in other's responses to Chris' questions. > > This is my third fall recording NFCs. For the last two I was doing it at > home, feeding the mic input to my home computer and recording with Easy Hi-Q > Recorder. > > This year I added a second mic at a nature center. There is no power at > the site, and I needed standalone recorder. Rather than kludge something > together I bought a SongMeter SM1-M (wildlifeacoustics.com). Kind of > pricey, but every other approach I could think of added up to the same cost > or more. You can set the SongMeter to record on whatever schedule you want. > It saves the data to an SDHC card. It provides power to the mic. > > The mic is based on Bill Evan's flowerpot design using the Knowles element, > but I put it on a government surplus mast to get it above some of the insect > noise. > > I've been using Bill Evan's tools Tseep-x and Thrush-x along with GlassOFire > to sort the data. I've been working in an unsystematic way to > estimate how well Tseep-x and Thrush-x work. It's obvious that they miss a > lot sounds, but by far most of them are too faint for me to be confident of > the identity of the caller, anyway. > > I just got Raven 1.3 and I'm thinking of running some comparisons with > Bill's tools. Has anyone done that? > > My biggest problem at home is katydid calls. I can sort through them pretty > fast using Glassofire, but it is a pain. > > David Martin > http://naturebits.org > > > > > -- > NFC-L List Info: > http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_WELCOME > http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_RULES > > http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html > -- > -- NFC-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_WELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_RULES http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html --
