Early this morning, while awake and listening to the sounds of the occasional but regular waves of migrants passing overhead (through the audio feed coming in through my Bill Evans-style rooftop-mounted microphone) I bolted alert after hearing this much higher frequency and longer in duration "Gray-cheeked Thrush", immediately thinking Bicknell's Thrush. I turned on my laptop monitor and snapped into the buffer in the Raven Pro sound analysis software to locate the call that had just occurred. Upon seeing the call structure in Raven, it was immediately recognizable as being a beautiful example of a BICKNELL'S THRUSH!
This bird probably passed within a few hundred yards of my recording station in Etna, NY, shortly after 1:15am. The winds are relatively calm right now, with the directional movement of birds being out of the Northeast (Adirondacks). This call conservatively peaks out at 4.908 kHz (or even 5.01kHz, depending upon how I adjust my spectrogram settings), and has a call duration being fairly "long" at 387 milliseconds. The call structure has a sharply peaked onset, with a relatively long and even descent. Gray-cheeked Thrush lacks the sharply peaked onset and is typically much more arched in appearance. Further, the typical Gray-cheeked Thrush call peaks out around 4.0kHz, with occasional variation to 4.5kHz. This call recording can be listened to by going to the message posted to the NFC-L Archive, here: http://www.mail-archive.com/nfc-l@cornell.edu/msg00888.html. Good birding and night listening! Sincerely, Chris T-H -- Christopher T. Tessaglia-Hymes Field Applications Engineer Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Lab of Ornithology 159 Sapsucker Woods Road, Ithaca, New York 14850 W: 607-254-2418 M: 607-351-5740 F: 607-254-1132 http://www.birds.cornell.edu/brp -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
