Bird call spectrograms

In a thread about birding apps the other day Peter Shute provided some links to information on understanding spectrograms of bird calls that I’ll quote here:

> There’s a good tutorial on reading spectrograms at http://earbirding.com/blog/specs. The Canyon Wren > spectrograms at http://earbirding.com/blog/specs/pitch-and-inflection can be compared to those in the > lite version of the app to get an idea of how much more useful they are when done well.

(For reference, The app in question above is iBird Pro 6.1 for North America.)

I finally had a chance to start looking at the earbirding site that Peter links to and just wanted to say it’s fascinating. I’ve already confirmed that I don’t have a great natural ear, but that’s not a shock. It looks like it will take some time to understand spectrograms but even after a few minutes with the examples, it’s easy to see how much this approach has to offer. Verbal transcriptions of calls have never helped me (ever) – and those of us with imperfect ears are likely to hear songs wrong. (There are three notes not two? It’s rising and *then* falling, not the other way around?) WIth the spectrogram, you can “see” the sound as it plays, making it a lot easier to hear it right. It’s a bit eerie and exciting if you’ve been hearing the song incorrectly and then start hearing the same recording differently. A pleasure denied to those of you with great ears. My sympathies 😉

Since the other day, I also saw a new app announced that’s taking an interesting approach to bird sounds. Instead of trying to be a full field guide with plates, etc. it’s an app with nothing but sounds. So, sounds but in a usable arrangement for people with the right kind of device. Some of you may be familiar with www.birdsounds.nl. As far as I know, they’re the most comprehensive commercial vendor of bird sounds on CD. CDs are an increasingly inconvenient format so Birdsounds seem to be moving towards downloads and now apps. There’s a free “lite” version of the Costa Rica app (presumably the first in a series) that lets you see the features and try it out with a handful of sounds. They’ve got recordings with recoding information and black-and-white spectrograms. I’m hoping that they move forward with this approach as it would really fill in a gap for those locations (most of the world) where there are paper field guides but no electronic field guides.

I’d love to hear more from people that have learned how to use spectrograms with bird calls and how it’s helped them. It’s hard to imagine any single way of becoming a better birder than becoming better at bird call identification. ===============================

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