Hi all,
I noticed quite a few mentions of xeno-canto these last few days, and thought it would be good to clarify some points.
Xeno-canto is a place where people share recordings of birds from all over the world, and this is done in mp3 format. For many research purposes, mp3 is fine. E.g., to substantiate an observation of a rare bird, as voucher specimens for biodiversity surveys, and indeed many people use them for more detailed vocal analyses as well. We do get requests for raw WAVs, and many recordists keep these at home, so we forward these requests to the recordists.
Xeno-canto does not put any restrictions on recording quality. You should see XC as a place to organise and share your own recordings, and we just provide a platform to do that. There are plenty of poor recordings (and even more very good ones) on XC, and they all have their purpose. For automatic identification, for instance, it is more relevant to try to match a template with a poor recording than with a good one, since the template (unknown ID) will probably be poor too. Recordings don’t have to be special or of rare birds. Even the most mundane birds will hold vocal surprises once you really start paying attention. This at least is my own experience with the (very well known, supposedly) European avifauna.
Australia has not been covered well up till now, and these collecitons become useful only when a certain critical mass has been reached. We invite you all to contribute some material. We are always happy to help out where possible, though we cannot do any digitization ourselves. But we are experienced to handle with larger datasets, and have uploaded large batches for some recordists in the past.
I hope to see some heightened interest in XC Australia soon! Feel free to ask any other questions.
cheers, Bob
Bob Planque xeno-canto.org ===============================
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G’day Bob and birding-aus folks.
I just wanted to thank Bob and the xeno-canto team for their great work in providing this resource.
I’m recently back from a year in nw Tanzania (see my blog: http://bukobasteve.blogspot.com/). Most of the time I was the only birder for hundreds of km and I struggled with the new bird calls. In addition the Kagera region of Tanzania is not well known and shares its bird species and subspecies more with central Africa than the rest of Tanzania. The field guides were very much guides. Xeno-canto was incredibly useful and I often found the calls from birds recorded in Uganda, Rwanda etc sounded more ‘right’ than the calls from Tanzania. I downloaded hundreds of calls onto my iPod and got many a tick with the help of these calls.
So, I recommend you all visit the site and maybe contribute. I haven’t yet because I have no recording gear worthy of the name. I did however record several birds on my Nokia phone and some of these were readily identified by members of the Tanzanian Birding fraternity over email. Ticks this way included Croaking and Trilling Cisticola, Freckled Nightjar, Emerald Cuckoo – also a mammal – the Greater Galago. I wish I’d figured out this technique earlier when I was struggling with the Greenbuls.
Cheers Steve Clark Hamilton ===============================
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