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 ===============================
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au
http://birding-aus.org ===============================
I have also used Xeno-Canto to great effect in Brazil – there are loads of recording for South America so you are spoilt for choice, but some of them are really surprisingly poor quality. I can do just as well with my Olympus DS40 dictating machine (which has a stereo built-in mike) provided there is not too much wind noise. And certainly recording calls for ID purposes is well worth doing and easy – no fancy gear required at all!
Rosemary