Recording Mauritius: Tropical Island Sound-Check

Thanks everyone for weighing in on our photo quiz! Meanwhile, halfway around the world on Mauritius, recordist Jon Erickson has been unpacking his bags and aiming his microphone at the tamarind tree in his yard. Here’s his first impressions of life in the middle of the Indian Ocean:

On the third morning after arriving on Mauritius, I woke up invigorated and refreshed.  Unfortunately, it was 2:30 in the morning.  Instead of fighting it, I decided to befriend the jetlag and put on a pot of coffee.

My wife and I are living in Flic en Flac on the western side of the island. The beach here sprawls along the coast, protected from the pounding of the Indian Ocean by a coral reef that lies several hundred yards offshore.  The beach is covered with European holidaymakers, but plenty of locals are present, too, underneath the myriad snorkels breaking the surface of the water.  Mauritius is well known for its mixture of cultures and religions, and it is not uncommon to see a group of Hindu worshipers offering flowers, clay idols, and coconuts into the ocean, or a Muslim woman snorkeling in full burka.

For a sound recordist like me, one unfortunate byproduct of this tourist town is the ever-present noise from vendors, taxi men, diesel trucks, scooters, barking dogs, etc.  But, at 2:30 in the morning, the noise is at bay.  I decide that this is a good time to check my equipment and see if everything survived the 25-hour flight from the States.

Bringing the various microphones and field recorders onto the patio, I focus on the massive tamarind tree hanging over our apartment building. During the day, birds create such a cacophony that even the diesel lorry with a punctured exhaust is in danger of being drowned out.  The primary ruckus-maker is good old Passer domesticus. But many of the island’s other species gravitate to the tree; the Madagascar Fody (pictured), Red-whiskered Bulbul, Common Myna, Spotted Weaver, and, to my surprise, a pair of macaque (monkeys). But right now, even the tree is silent.

Switching on the recorder and putting on the headphones, I am happy to see and hear that everything is working. Turning up the gain, I can hear some distant details that I wouldn’t be able to pick up with a naked ear:  some dogs barking near the beach, an impatient rooster, the waves hitting the nearby jetty.  The barking escalates and I begin to wonder what’s going on.  I decide to let my imagination run freely and dub this test recording “dogs chasing monkey.” Shortly afterward, I record my second masterpiece “monkey chasing cat.” Two recordings destined for my personal collection only.

With the equipment checked out and working, I start imagining the recording field trips to come. With erratic buses, expensive taxis, and the prospect of theft looming over any bike or scooter I might buy, there’s some planning to be done. I’m hoping the local conservationists in the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation can help out. Since the 1980s this foundation has been instrumental in bringing back many of the island’s endangered bird species from the brink of extinction, including the Mauritius Kestrel and the famed Pink Pigeon, which at one point numbered only 10 individuals. I am eager to meet with them to see, first hand, the work that they are accomplishing, and to ask some advice about my own project.

Outside of the more elusive endemics, the island is rich in interesting birds. My initial impression is that nearly any abandoned lot will reveal a decent number of species. Fortunately, I live near Black River Gorges National Park, home not only to the kestrel and Pink Pigeon, but also the Mauritius (or Echo) Parakeet, the Mauritius Cuckoo-Shrike, and the Mauritius Bulbul. It’s only a short bus ride followed by a 3-mile hike to the visitor center.

I’m hoping that, by the end of the week, I will begin producing some recordings that will rival “dogs chasing monkey” and “monkey chasing cat.”

Photo Quiz 2: Funky Birds With Bright Markings

We got such an enthusiastic response to our first photo quiz that we’ve decided to launch another one. This one’s certainly not a tricky-ID problem—few people would look at these two photos and see two closely related species requiring keen attention to detail to separate.

And yet, they aren’t your everyday species and, despite their bold markings, they can be somewhat hard to locate when flipping through a field guide. I only noticed their overall similarities as I was assembling our November featured photographer portfolio, for Matt Shellenberg (spoiler alert: other photos of these two species are identified there).

Wait a minute, I said to myself, these are two strongly marked brown, yellow, gray, and black birds with big beaks. Identifying them is pretty straightforward—but why? What is your brain doing to separate these two birds from each other and from everything else? What advice would you give to a beginner to nudge them toward the right part of the field guide? As I said last week, we’re thinking a lot about the process of bird ID right now, and we’d love to know how you get to your answers.

Not only that, but they’re two cool birds, aren’t they? Here’s a closer look.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Thanks in advance for your answers. We’ll post a roundup in a few days.

(This photo quiz is powered by Birdshare contributors Stephen Parsons, Greg Page, and Kaustubh Deshpande. [spoiler alert! the birds are identified on those pages too])

New Online Course Helps You Learn Bird Behavior

We’ve just launched a new online course about birds and behavior. Titled “Courtship and Rivalry in Birds,” it’s appropriate for all levels of interest and birdwatching expertise—anyone who’s ever seen a bird have an odd hop, wing-stretch, or squabble and wondered what it meant. The five-week course is taught on a rotating basis, and enrollment is open now for classes that begin November 11, 2009, and January 6, 2010.

The course covers territoriality, aggressive and courtship displays, and the fascinating field of sexual selection, all vividly illustrated with examples ranging from the familiar Red-winged Blackbird to New Guinea’s exotic birds-of-paradise.

The course takes students beyond book-based learning. It dissects the mercurial aspects of bird behavior with sound, video, interactive slideshows, simple online games, and conversations with scientists.

“You get the whole gamut—from birds you might see in your backyard to the most spectacular birds on the planet,” said course coauthor Kevin McGowan. “If you pay attention, there are a lot of things happening—you can look at small movements, see how movements are put together, and figure out what it all means”—all rendered beautifully onscreen with video from the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library.

Tuition is $295 for the five-week course. Cornell Lab members can enroll for $255 by calling 866-326-7635. Class sizes are small (15-35 students), so get your place early!

From the Field: Recording Birdsong in Mauritius

Jon Erickson is living on the island of Mauritius for the next nine months. While his wife pursues a Fulbright scholarship to study local children’s literature, Jon plans to explore the island, recorder and parabolic microphone in hand, gathering natural sounds for our ever-expanding archives in the Macaulay Library. Mauritius, a former French colony, is a tropical island in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. It’s home to 81 bird species.

A teacher and writer with a degree in philosophy, Jon will appear on this blog every few weeks to report on what he’s been finding. Here’s a brief background from Jon himself:

At the age of eight, I managed to catch a cottonmouth in the pond behind my house with a piece of cheese and a rope.  I remember watching the writhing creature with fascination until my horrified mother pulled me away from an untimely death. Apparently her protection fostered love rather than fear for wildlife, and my interest continues to this day.

So when my wife won a Fulbright to study in Mauritius for a year, I thought about all the remarkable wildlife I might find on this small island. Apart from Mauritius being the famous home of the Dodo, I realized I didn’t know much about the country’s wildlife, and I wondered about how to share what I would be learning.

After some inquiries, I was contacted by Greg Budney, audio curator of the Macaulay Library, who asked if I’d be interested in recording wildlife sounds for the library while on the island.  This meshed well with another of my life’s interests; I am also a musician and have an extensive background in sound recording. After a trip to Ithaca to meet Greg and the wonderful staff at the library, the project was born.

So now, here I am in Mauritius with a bag of loaned recording equipment, some field guides, a map, and a book entitled Speak Mauritian Kreol in Seven Easy Lessons.  I hope that in the nine months my wife and I are here I’ll be able to make an extensive set of recordings for the library. I’m aiming for around half of the island’s 81 species, especially 10 endemics (most are highly endangered): Pink Pigeon, Mauritius Kestrel, Mauritius Cuckoo-shrike,  Mascarene White-eye, Mauritius White-eye, Mauritius Parakeet, Mauritius Fody, Herald Petrel, Rodrigues Fody, and Rodrigues Brush-Warbler.

But for now I have to get settled. So goodbye—or as they say in Mauritius, orevwar!

Photo Quiz: Cape May Edition

Last weekend our ace programmer, France Dewaghe, skipped out of Ithaca for Cape May to catch the tail-end of fall migration. Here at work, we had been thinking a lot about bird identification and the power of groups to hone in on IDs, even tricky ones. So when France came back with a memory card full of bird photos—in his spare time he’s also the reigning champ in the digital SLR category of the World Series of Birding—we thought we’d give you all a look at one of the most enduring of all ID problems.

Take a look at these two birds and leave us a comment about what you think they are. Are they the same species or different species? Different age or sex? What do you think they are, and what leads you to that conclusion? We’re interested in hearing from anyone out there, whether you’re an expert or just learning; whether you know the answer or just have a hunch.

Here are the images one by one, a little bigger. Both were taken October 25, 2009, at the hawk-watching platform in Cape May, New Jersey.

Exhibit A:

and Exhibit B:

Let us know if you like these bird quizzes and we’ll offer more from time to time (you can also check out the semi-regular Mystery Bird feature at GrrlScientist). And if you find all this bird ID confusing, check out our Inside Birding video series for easy-to-use tips on your technique.

(Images by France Dewaghe)

Pretty Greeting Cards Warble, Tweet to Readers

A new line of greeting cards lets you send an elegant piece of bird art and bring it to life with accurate sounds of the species on the front. The cards are a collaboration between an English company, Really Wild Cards, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Each card features a lovely bird painting taken from the Cornell Lab’s own art collection. When you open the card you’ll hear about 15 seconds of calls and song for that species, drawn from our comprehensive archives in the Macaulay Library. At present there are 14 species available (ranging from Common Loon to Yellow-headed Blackbird), with more cards slated for release about every six months.

You can order the cards through the Wild Birds Unlimited store in Sapsucker Woods (or call 877-266-4928). Visit the website to see all the artwork and hear the sounds for each card. A portion of proceeds comes back to the Cornell Lab to help fund our mission of research, conservation, education, and citizen science.

Young Sparrows Learn by Eavesdropping

Birdsong fascinates scientists because it’s varied, beautiful, complicated—and because many birds learn songs in a way similar to how humans learn language. Studying the way young birds acquire their songs might allow us to solve problems with the way children develop language.

Much song research is done by watching young birds in captivity, but research just published today tackled the formidable task of following birds through field and forest. The approach gave the researchers a more realistic picture of how young birds behave. The scientists, led by grad student Chris Templeton of University of Washington, discovered that juvenile Song Sparrows are more interested in listening to two adult male Song Sparrows sing at each other than in listening to just one. That’s an exciting finding, because it suggests that the young birds don’t just mimic the sounds of a single adult. They listen to the way the two birds trade song phrases and types back and forth, perhaps learning the appropriate context for each phrase, or at least learning which song types are the most common in their neighborhood.

The researchers get extra points for effort. They set up experiments in a large, wild park in Seattle. Since they weren’t working with caged birds, they attached tiny radio-transmitters to 11 juvenile Song Sparrows so they could keep tabs on their whereabouts. In a series of experiments, speakers set up near each bird played the sound of either one adult Song Sparrow, two adult Song Sparrows singing at each other, or, as controls, the sounds of one or two Black-capped Chickadees. As the sounds played, the researchers kept close track of the young Song Sparrow’s actions. They found that the birds moved much closer to the speaker when it played two Song Sparrows than with any other recording. Their response to a single Song Sparrow wasn’t much different from their response to chickadee recordings—essentially mild curiosity rather than the keen interest they had in two birds conversing.

The research is only a few hours old, but it’s already appeared in a number of news outlets. Several of the stories tout the finding that young sparrows learn their songs, but what’s really exciting here is their interest in eavesdropping on an adult “conversation.” When people first started studying birdsong we thought of birds as tiny tape recorders that heard a song, then reproduced it as best it could. In the decades since then we’ve gradually seen how much learning and even improvising (in the case of mockingbirds, for example) goes on. Now it seems that even in their first few months of life, Song Sparrows are attuned not only to sound, but to social interactions that, as adults, they will have to navigate using their voices.

(Image: Song Sparrow by birdmandea via Birdshare; hear more Song Sparrows and see videos on All About Birds)

(Full disclosure: I knew Chris Templeton in grad school about 10 years ago, when he was a Master’s student working with chickadees. Way to go Chris!)

Gadget Alert! Closest Hummingbird Views Ever

What do you get when you cross a welder’s mask with a hummingbird feeder? About the closest view of a hummingbird possible without actually climbing inside a flower. At least that’s how it looks from this video demonstration (YouTube).

Sure, with a bit of persistence and a porch full of feeders you can make hummers comfortable enough that they’ll sip from a feeder you’re holding. But this “Eye-to-Eye” mask [cleverly if illegibly rendered as an emoticon :--2<:, get it? ] puts the flower virtually inside your head.

The entire helmet is bright red to attract the attention of even the most unobservant hummingbirds, and  a yellow flower pattern leads to a feeding tube right between your eyes. The mask keeps you safe from any inadvertent stabs from off-target birds. According to one report you can feel the downdraft from the bird’s wings as it hovers before you.

The product sells for $80 from the ingenious inventors at heatstick.com. If you’ve ever worn a red baseball cap in the tropics and wished the hummingbirds that buzzed you would stick around a little longer, this might be the product for you. And the holidays are just around the corner.

(Via Gizmodo; thanks Sitta for the tip!)

Living Bird—New Issue Online Now

The cover story in Living Bird Summer 2009—now free online—offers up a tempting prospect for listers: Your trip in search of Mexico’s endemic Tufted Jay just might hold the key to the species’ survival. Or read Stephen J. Bodio’s article about how pigeons influenced Darwin’s thinking on evolution, and never look at pigeons the same way again. Next time you find yourself with some unexpected time on your hands, take inspiration from Chuck Graham. He spent an extra six days stranded on California’s Channel Islands with little more than a kayak and a bunch of Xantus’s Murrelets.

Those are just the features. David Wilcove turns his conservation spotlight on the world’s albatrosses, hit hard by collateral damage from industrial fishing and the world’s appetite for tuna. Pete Dunne takes a whimsical look at cats that might be birders, and John Schmitt sketches a pond boiling over with Violet-green Swallows.

Lab members should be receiving their Autumn 2009 copies of Living Bird any day now. I’ve said it before, but I’ll just mention again for new readers how important—and easy—it is to join the Lab (watch the video). We’re a nonprofit organization that gets less than 1% of our funding from Cornell University. Memberships are a major part of the funding that we depend upon to keep going. Thanks to everyone who supports us – and enjoy the new issue.

In-Flight Albatross Cam Finds the Birds Feeding with Killer Whales

You know what’s super-cool? Putting a lipstick-sized camera on the back of a Black-browed Albatross and turning it loose to forage across the windswept Southern Ocean. That’s what scientists from the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan and the British Antarctic Survey have done with four of the birds, and they’ve wound up with a remarkable albatross-eye view of life pieced together from more than 28,000 photos. They’ve learned that albatrosses sometimes forage in groups, as in the formation shot above (I love the pink feet trailing behind No. 2 and the leader keeping an eye on the others over its shoulder). But there’s more.

Here, at least four albatrosses follow an orca (killer whale), a behavior that hadn’t been documented before. It stands to reason, British Antarctic Survey scientist Richard Phillips said—tropical seabirds sometimes forage with tuna schools, and albatrosses routinely follow fishing vessels. Nevertheless, it’s pretty exciting to get confirmation in an image of these birds coasting behind the whale, almost drafting off its dorsal fin (click for larger version).

I love this vantage point: a single bird high above the water, sizing up a massive iceberg off in the distance. Scientists have been putting instruments on albatrosses and other birds for years now, but this is the first time they’ve brought back pictures. If they can combine this with GPS locations, they’ll gain new insights into albatross behavior and may also learn about vast stretches of ocean that scientists seldom visit—much the way oceanographers are learning about undersea conditions through the totally cool Tagging of Pacific Pelagics program.

The work appears today in the open-access journal PLOS One. Below, a look at the tiny fraction of an albatross’s life spent on land. These highlights were filmed by the British Antarctic Survey at their longtime study site, a breeding colony on Bird Island, South Georgia, about 1,000 miles east of Tierra del Fuego.

See Living Bird magazine for more about the ways industrial fishing is endangering the world’s albatrosses, as well as new techniques to help avoid the impact.

(Images courtesy the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan; video courtesy British Antarctic Survey.)