Matthew,
When Michael O'Brien and I put together the Flight Call Guide (circa 2001),
the vast majority of people had slow internet connections and it didn't seem
practical to put long sound cuts on the web -- distributing the guide on a
data CD made more sense. But most birders today have fast internet....and
there are more people recording and studying flight calls. I think the
successor to the current CD will likely be online with many contributors.
There isn't currently a central depository for bird song recordings in North
America, but the web brings the multiple archives together and allows an
individual access to all. Same thing will likely happen for flight calls,
this listserv is part of it, and ultimately it's a wild animal whose course
is hard to predict -- but I wouldn't expect any comprehensive updates to the
knowledge of landbird night flight call identity in eastern NA for at least
three years. Of course, more specific clarification on particular pieces of
the puzzle may emerge at any time.
The finch flight call information in the guide was based largely on
Michael's and my field experience. My contribution was the fact that I
hardly ever had recorded finch flight calls in a decade of nocturnal
recording from interior US [note though that I had not extensively studied
the period November through December]. We had both noted finch flight
calling in the predawn period though it was interesting that Michael's finch
nfcs from the Atlantic Coastal region were consistently earlier in the
morning than my inland recordings. I had noted some finch flight calls from
the middle of the night but there is the aspect David Martin pointed out
that when you just get a few incidences of a species calling at night and
you don't know whether it's true nocturnal migration behavior or whether
it's a bird flushed by an owl, etc. What Michael and I conveyed in the guide
was that finch flight calling in the hour or two before sunrise is a regular
behavior -- and that finch flight calling in the middle of the night is
unknown and that finches are thought to be largely diurnal migrants. As far
as I know, that paradigm is still good until someone documents otherwise --
note that I used the term night movements (not migration) in my prior email.
There is a lot of weird bird movement that happens in artificially lit
coastal regions at night.
BTW, the shallow end of the pool for night flight calls is northern Canada.
Iowa is the deep end!
Bill E
Bill Evans wrote:
but it is now thought that all finches are sometimes involved with night
movements in the east, especially in coastal areas.
Mr. Evans,
As interest in NFCs grows and new information is gathered, portions of
your Flight Calls CD will naturally become outdated, as this comment shows
with respect to the finch species accounts. I hope to have a recording
setup in place for the spring migration, so I've got a couple of questions
about your CD reference as I begin wading into the shallow end of the
pool:
Is there a revised or remodeled version of Flight Calls in the works?
Are the finches now considered presumed/hypothetical night migrants, or
are there confirmed night flight calling for some of the species?
Are there other major family changes since the CD came out where, like
finches, groups not previously known to call at night have been found to
do so on occasion?
Thanks,
Matthew Kenne
Algona, Iowa
[email protected]
--
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
--
