Does anyone have any wisdom to share about why such a high fraction of my detections right now (and also last fall in one time segment) are Savannah Sparrows? I'm in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, just east of Cleveland about 8 km south of Lake Erie. Savannahs are not among the more commonly reported species here. They are rarely banded at the banding station a couple of km from my house. Yet, of 384 sparrow calls detected in the data I've had time to analyze since April 4, 80 have been Savannah Sparrows. The only species with more detections has been Chipping Sparrows. I gather that Savannah Sparrows are also over-represented at other stations. Mark Shieldcastle mentioned that the same thing was observed last fall by Bill Evan's monitoring stations at Black Swamp Bird Observatory in western Ohio, and I remember seeing a passing mention of this on this list in the past. I can think of several possible explanations: greater calling frequency, louder calls, lower flight altitude. Has anyone got other thoughts or some actual data to share? A sidelight: I've finally gotten fast enough at IDs and gained enough confidence to feel like I'm getting at least some of them right to start posting data as I analyze it. Here's link to the site: http://listeningup.wordpress.com/summary-of-night-flight-calls-detected/ What I've had time to do so far is fairly crude, but the information is there. Wordpress seems to be in a bad mood this morning, and it won't update my graph, but I had 47 warbler/sparrow frequency detections last night. Thanks for any insights into the Savannah question. Laura Gooch --
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