 So thanks for coming out, hope you're enjoying your fest. We're really, really pleased to have Bill here to share his work today, but also to add his equipment on top of the Nature Center right now, our external recording audio devices up there. It's been a pleasure to learn some of the technology that goes into this, to add this to the record part of things that we can do here at the Nature Center. And I was trying to think of how I would introduce Bill, and it didn't get very far. But Bill is a hereditary, an itinerant acoustic biologist, that has hands in many pies in many states all over. He is as migratory as the birds in which we are listening to him, right? And I was trying to think of what Bill's spirit bird would be, as somebody who has his head up in the clouds and all that. But listening to our hereditary species up high in the sky during migration season, we're traveling all around doing this work. And so if you can think of a bird that fits that profile, you'd love to know an hour from now, and you will be your spirit bird fly. So anyway, without any further ado, I'll let Bill take the board. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you to Chemp, and to John, Zach, and the whole staff of the North Brandish Nature Center. And also, very importantly, Richard L'Hauer here. I think they're a new resident in the area, a hard-core herder. And he got interested in the work that I've been promoting for about 30 years, which is acoustic monitoring of avian, national playhouse. And Richard got a microphone earlier this year, and has facilitated that microphone getting on the roof of this building. And every night, for all the sound coming down from the sky, from about 8.30 to 5.30 in the morning. And then we just got to see that in most of August. Yesterday, I'm in Christchurch, we're listening to the night of August 25th and 26th. And so, when we listen to the sound, if you're a little bit... This is about two in the morning, so the hard traffic has died down. But if you listen in the background, there's little occasional short chip notes, seek notes, the variety of notes from... These are the short flight calls that might migrate mostly whorlers on this night. You get some sparrows mixed in too. And both of these calls are about 10th to 20th in the second half. So they're like a single picture. And you can learn to identify them, but it's not a 10 to 15-year process. By the way, Richard also needs Wilson Marvel for his coming to this film. We'll help you out later today. So, I don't know if you can listen for a second. I'll play some of it a little bit, but some of the louder short chip notes. And it takes a little while to tune into these calls. If you're walking your dog out at night, you can hear them anywhere, across most of North America. But there's a very dense flight across Vermont. And it's mostly hearing the valleys, hearing the downfall of my deer. Probably tonight is going to be a good flight. You just walk outside and listen up. You've got to get away from the insects. Anyway, we'll play some of these in a little bit. Now, always good, take a step back, and realize we're in a very big process of life. It's been going on for a very long time. And continuing on, you know where it's going to go. There's biases in science. And, you know, this type of evolutionary tree might appeal more to you birds with the birds. Same thing happens with bird watchers. You've got your proto-verder, your initialverder, but then you get specialization through time. Goal watchers spend a lot of time at landfills in the winter. Maybe it's the old factory evolutionary development, blocking out smells, I don't know. Hawk watchers, specializing in seeing for any insects in the sky. Feeder watchers. I don't know, I think Cornell is working on computers to attach right to a feeder watcher so they can send in their data and proceed with it. Songbirds, which is sort of where I started. The migrations of songbirds and workers and fascinating phenomena. Night migration, more of a newer phenomenon that's what we're going to be talking about. Night migration, well, you know, I think it's only about 50 to 70 years ago that it really became apparent that most bird migration happens at night, obviously. And this is the songbirds. But almost everything, even sometimes one of the earliest forms of studying night migration was putting a telescope or a vernacular on a full moon, a full migration mode and seeing the birds for a while. Acoustic monitoring goes way back. Imagine Native Americans, first people in these places that we're at right now on the ridges wherever thousands of years ago undoubted in hearing these phenomena. The vocalizations of birds and night migration. Radar coming out of World War II, really developing out of World War II, really showing the expanse of birds and other things flying around at night in the atmosphere. Thermal imaging, the heat, studying the heat of birds. It's amazing how far the thermal imaging can when you can see birds a thousand feet away. Little songbirds migrating over that night. So avian night migration evolved out of favorable circumstances. There's the economy of flying at night in that a lot of most of our birds feed during the day. So if they flew all day, then they'd have to rest all night without refueling. So for songbirds, it's much more much easier if they migrate at night and then they can feed berries, insects during the day. You know, I might just turn this off but I haven't listened to this yet and I'm not sure what we're going to run into. It could be a car coming by. The other thing about night migration is avoiding predators. You have merlins, sharp shin hawks, a lot of raptors that specialize in eating small songbirds and they have no cover if they're flying along distance down in Central or South America at night. So, I mean, during the day. So if they migrate at night, they have that advantage of avoiding predators. And I put many here because fairly recently it was discovered there's a species of bat in Europe that actually preys on night migrating songbirds. I don't think that happens here in North America. The other thing is, physically easier at night it's cooler than the air's less turbulent and the utility of using celestial navigation on long flights. Now these birds in night migration are flying generally over the lay of the land. There's migrations down the valleys in Vermont but they're not flying over hills and into the valleys like this. They get above the lay of the land and they just fly and they get into sort of a rhythm where they... where it's relatively easy for them and they don't have to keep continually adjusting. So none of them can see each other and they can't see objects. They've got to get above trees. They've got to get now above wind turbines. They've got to get above mountains. So, one of the things that spawned out of the development of radar in World War II was weather radar and now we have this amazing system of weather radar across the U.S. called NEXRAD radar and you can see we have a few dots up here here in Vermont. I'm not exactly sure where that one is up there. Up near Burlington maybe. Camp Johnson. Camp Johnson. And this was last night across the continent. Now radar basically is like taking a flashlight and it's using a wavelength of electromagnetic radiation that we can't see and it shoots that around and it listens for reflections and then through computer algorithms they can paint a picture of what's coming back. Now what comes back is what reflects off water. So any biological organism flying in the atmosphere and I can get picked up by the NEXRAD and of course rain can get picked up. So birds, bats and bugs. That's what this is. But the targets can be generalized to mostly birds. Sometimes if you look at the flight speed of the targets and there's another mode of NEXRAD they'll allow you to see the speed of the targets. You can access this map if you go to your web browser and type in N-C-A-R radar archive. They have, from all those dots around the country they have the last five nights archive. And if you click on the continental link you can see right now you can see this instant anywhere across the continent. So here's basically a big bird migration last night. Mostly birds probably. Not as much up where we are. But again this is looking it has a slight angle. So when you see these big blooms like this a lot of that is fairly high in the atmosphere. It doesn't mean we did have migration here last night but it might have been below the ability of radar to see it. And of course radar can't see through a mountain so Vermont is not really a radar friendly state like these mountains. With very specialized radar you could probably study what's migrating along the valleys. Is that the hurricane off the... the hurricane this afternoon that's the forecast. So this is the forecast map for this afternoon. So you see here's a cold front and here's the high with the winds going clockwise. And this big bird migration happened last night here following this high pressure. The hurricane here with counterclockwise winds also might have brought us we had sort of an easterly wind this would have been a little bit further south last night. I don't know what happened last night here but we did get the recording. But so this cold front is going to sweep across the state tonight and by tomorrow morning it's going to be through northern Vermont. I think tomorrow morning is going to be an excellent early morning here because there'll be a nice wave of migrants following that cold front. There's going to be some clouds maybe some light rain as that comes in in the morning and I don't know it looks really good tomorrow morning. Not that it's bad today but it looks really good. Sorry. That's right. With all the winds from the hurricane does that mean that we're going to have some unusual earthier birds? No. No it wasn't close enough. The hurricane has to get closer with those strong winds. I mean it's kind of impossible that something could get pushed down the St. Lawrence and then eventually find its way through Vermont but I wouldn't be out looking for hurricane birds today or tomorrow or from this hurricane in general. Can I ask a question about the radar? Sure. I don't need you to go back on that. If so was primarily in the east is that the slides focused to be primarily in the east to show or was there just not as much happening in the west? This is from 10 p.m. eastern daylight time and all the way from track to a three hours it hadn't taken off yet. Yeah. If you look at later in the night the sea blooms here but the blooms out west generally aren't as big. They don't have the same density of night migrants as we do here in the east. We just have a tremendous number of birds migrating overnight. And it seemed like you were correlating the bigger blooms in the middle of the country that you're seeing there with that area of high pressure. Yeah. So that's going to move over. So theoretically we might get those big blooms tonight or certainly tomorrow night. It looks like the cold front is going to be right on top of us tonight. So would Ohio have gotten yesterday? Or tonight? Yeah. Ohio could have gotten out last night. So this is the forecast for this afternoon. So actually the cold front isn't going to go through Ohio until tonight. So tomorrow would be really good. Now birds, if it's light winds like it was last night, it's sort of light east where we live here the workload's just still going to go. They are programmed to go at a certain time of the year and they'll go if the flying's good. They're not going to go if it's a strong south wind. So that's a day not to necessarily go out birding next morning. But pay attention to the weather if you really optimize your birding. When you really get the feeder like Richard does you want to be out every day. But you can because work, work and life gets in the way. So you need to maximize your birding by paying attention to the weather. So when you go out it's good. And there's all sorts of tricks of where to bird and things like that that are sort of correlated with weather. All right, so we've discussed radar which is an active form of studying night migration. Coustics is passive. As I remember the first peoples here have heard these flights undoubtedly. They might have listened to geese coming over and think okay, the geese are back. Now we can finally get something to eat after. It's like getting through the whole winter. I don't know what they thought. I don't think anyone does. Especially with things like warblers. What did they think of warblership notes? Did they know, you know, people couldn't travel back then. So the first peoples here didn't know that these birds went to South America and Central America. But they experienced the flight by these sounds. So flight calling phenomenon. Has anyone heard of these calls? Got a few people back here. I'll play some more examples. They give these calls, especially warblers and sparrows, and almost all of them are for maintaining in-flight associations of some sort. You have to realize it's dark up there. And when you have large numbers of birds moving, they do not want to crash into one another. It's very important that they work out their flight spacing. Breakaway crashing into another bird, that's it. So over time, evolutionarily, that's where we think this flight call system sort of came as a form of air traffic control. There's also echolocation, which comes in handy, I think, especially on a foggy morning when they're looking for a place to land or a low-cloud ceiling at night. They definitely get some feedback. Their call comes out of their mouth, it goes down, hits the ground, it comes back up, and they get that constant feedback when they're giving these calls. The interesting thing is there's whole groups like murios and fly catchers. They migrate at night, but they did not get calls as far as we know. If you think for us during the day, you'd think that would be making sense. Not that. Maybe they're just utilizing the calls of other birds. So early American ornithological literature has some, a few papers, that discuss night flight calls. The first one was George Libby, 1899 near Madison, Wisconsin. He sat on the hill and counted the number of little chip notes, the number of little sparrows going over. He counted 4,000 or something like that. And you get this paper here by Copman, the first paper to describe the night flight call of the veery. Howells, 2012. This is somewhere in New England. Figured out, he counted the olive back thrush, especially just now, our slain sense thrush, and it has a beautiful spring keeper on my call at night. He counted those. And then Tyler, the first, and I think he was based in Massachusetts, the first person to describe oven bird night flight call. Now back in the, about the late 50s, a fellow named Richard Graber, based at the Illinois Natural History Survey, got very curious about night migration and teamed up with a guy named Bill Cochran. Cochran was an electrical engineer at the University of Illinois and designed this recording system. Now he couldn't just go by a computer, so back in the late 50s, there wasn't a lot off the shelf and everything had to be developed. So Cochran developed this system of reel-to-reel tapes that would record 10 minutes out of every hour. And then they would sample 10 minutes out of every hour all through the night, go back and listen to the calls and make some sense out of it. He has this big parabolic dish and the hay bales for blocking other extraneous environmental sounds. So I got into this in about 1985. I was out camping in eastern Minnesota and heard this huge flight and I basically dropped everything and started doing this. So I have been doing this continuously since 1985. Back then, I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know. I thought swamps and stretches were febis. I knew nothing. And I started with a little literature loose out there and I went down to visit Graver and Cochran. And, you know, just started working at it. Now eventually, I developed these little homemade microphones. You can still go to the website oldbird.org and for $35, $40, you can build your own microphone for tuning in. It's a little more involved with that. And not that many people actually do it, but a bunch of kids have done it through the years. And I've actually now got a... I realize that not that many people were building their own. So I had to build one and sell it. And I've got these... And this is a really good microphone. This is what Richard bought that's on the roof here. And so that sound you're hearing earlier is from one of these on the roof. This guy's got about a 60-degree comb going up of enhanced sensitivity. These are some earlier models. All right, now we get to the quiz. All right, the first one is easy. Mainly because I already have the picture up there. But if you hear this, if you're out walking your dog at night... It starts out weak, gets louder, and it'll get weaker again because, again, if you have a fixed microphone, birds will fly up over the wall. They're closer. You've got to get down to speed. It's a black belt. Yeah. What? Was it a black belt? No. One of you can get this bird to fly up over your house. Every one of you. It's a start-up. They're heading somewhere south. It's my fault. I don't make this fall during the day. You can't hear it. There's a couple of weaker calls in this neighborhood. The key thing here is this is a wonderful way to build up your yard list. That's Leaston. That was the all-building loophole. My idea is mixed up. Head down and roll over in South America. Okay, so now we get to the real hard stuff. This is the War of Loose and Sparrows. These are those short little chips I was trying to point out earlier. I'm going to first play American Red Star at Night Flight Call. Again, these were learned by a 15-year effort by myself and a guy named Michael O'Brien from Cape May. We studied the flight calls of these birds for a long time during the day. Then we matched them spectrographically with these unknown calls during the night. Here's American Red Star. You're going to get quizzed on this. Pay attention to whether... I mean, I'm going to do a quiz at the end. I'll play four species. Pay attention to whether it's a rising note, a descending note, a buzzy note, or a pure tone note. Two calls... Oops, hold on a second. That was American Red Star. That's the spectrogram. It goes down and then up. I'll play it. Let's do that one more time. You've got to be quick. But that's what it looks like spectrographically. Spectrographically, this is frequency on the y-axis and time. So this is only a hundred milliseconds, a tenth of a second long. That's why it's so hard. So let me... Okay, here's American Red Star. Next one's black and white warbler. That has a little buzz to it. Next one's Canada. And then white throat sparrow. All right, so now... Here's the quiz part. All right, ready? Here's your first quiz. Red Star. I think you're right. Next one. Let's hear the Red Star again. The one you think is Red Star. Then I'll play the next one. I think black and white's probably a good guess. Okay, let's try it again. Red Star. Red Star. Probably the black and white. Canada. Canada, yeah. And then finally... Longer. Longer. You don't need to sing songs tonight. You're just air traffic control. I'm here, where are you? The amazing thing about sound is, I mean, when you hear that, we're hearing that man, Dick Raver. That's a tape. I went to University of Illinois and got some of the original tapes in an archive in the Cornell, one that used to work at Cornell. And to preserve those... And that's really... What I see this fall after it was about is, you know, we go out and we bird watch here now, but we're in this big, huge thing of life that's going on. Who knows how long? I remember when I was a kid growing up and I had this realization, I was a birder and I really wanted to see, I just had this urge, what this place was like a hundred years ago, what North America was like before Western Europeans came and all the changes have happened. And you can't get that. It's gone. And so, you know, I think a lot of this for me is about getting, you know, back to me realizing how powerful this monitoring technique is, because we can record on that night of August 25, 26, a week or so ago, two weeks ago now, over this building, that's the only time I've analyzed so far, we had 665 warrenboard experimental plants. That doesn't really count the freshest. And that's a median night. We're going to get 1,000 warrenboard nights here, because this is a great location and so one of the things I have a stage, the closest station that I've been monitoring night flight calls is down near Albany, New York. It's a little village called Chatham and it's on this side of the mountain, on the west side of the mountains. There's a picture of the microphone. You can see some of the city there. It's right downtown. Not a bad place. You get car noises but you don't have insects. When you're trying to monitor warrenboard and sparrows, insects are the worst thing. Car noises you can filter out. So I'm going to show you some of the data from Canada Warbler. Here's the breeding range of Canada Warbler. And this is where they winter in northern South America and they have this migration route. And when they fly, they give that call and it's sort of a rough shit. Like, no. So what I've been doing at this site is I have five years of data from 2012 to 2016. And this is the average ratio of Canada Warbler night flight calls to all Warbler and Sparrow night flight calls on a weekly running average here. So you see, from that site there in eastern New York Canada Warblers from mid-August are peaking at about 3%. So 3 out of 100 calls will be Canada Warbler on the other here. Here, your Canada Warbler is in the higher. I can tell just by listening to that on 1925-26. It was like 30-40% Canada Warbler. I mean, not quite that high, but it was much higher than 3%. So you know thanks to Richard for bringing this microphone here and I'm going to push for North Branch to record and get at least 3-5 years of data. And get this data archive, get it out there, put it online, take out the good recordings and put them on the website and you know, and get that baseline data now because once it's gone it's gone. We lost last night we'll never go back and get last night. But one night isn't critical. But season data, if you get a few seasons together you start to paint a picture of what the acoustic pattern means here. Even though we haven't exactly figured out how to connect that to the population. Because not all birds call on the migrated night and some of them call at different rates. But if you do anyone does breeding bird surveys, you don't get all the birds. It's just a sample, it's just an index. So this is another independent index for the species of the vocalizing migration. I have done a little bit of monitoring in Vermont and not much in 1997 upon Mount Mansfield of Vins we had a station for the fall. And unfortunately that was all on high-five VCR tape. And I've only got one night that I managed to digitize. It's tricky. So I lost a lot of the data but that was Mount Mansfield recently here. And it was a mid-September night with a few Swannes' Threshes calling. I did an acoustic study on Glee Mountain. It's about 3,000 feet south of here in Vermont. And I had one microphone station in spring and fall 2004-2005 I think on the top and one at the bottom. And in both seasons there was a lot more migration especially in spring in the valley. And that's something now I can go back and put that online that wind project never ended up being built. Oldbird.org we've got tools here. There's people all over starting to make better software. And you know this is hopefully going to be a real citizen and groove effort over the next decade or two to really automate this so you can wake up in the morning and see what was flying. You know with computers automatically recognizing the identity of the species. And Cornell is working on it. Lots of folks are working on it and it's going to be fun. It's just modern birdwatch in the future. In the meantime you can build a $35 microphone and put it on your roof. If you're really interested in building your yard list or tuning in. But our power companies hiring you know when they're doing siding for wind farms I used to do I used to get a lot of jobs from power companies siding wind energy. And then when they started to push into some dense migration areas I ended up being hired by the opposite side. And after that I stopped getting hired by them. It's an interesting very political world wind energy and we need it because we don't have any other better alternatives. So there's places for it and there's also places where it shouldn't go. A little side story here I used to work for Dick Graber when I was a grad student. Wow. There's a sad part though he would go out on the migrations at fall on a night or in the morning following a foggy night to go to the television radio and television because the migrating birds would home in on the lights and we picked up from one night, one night from three powers 3,000 dead migrating birds and most of them caught the 10,000 rod in the cornfield flocking around the world. And there are every species you can imagine. Grieves, hat birds, inches or worse it's astonishing I love to talk with you afterwards I've got a chance to come up but I'll just say that I co-sponsored the first workshop trying to address that problem in 1999 in Cornell and with Fish and Wildlife Service and we brought in FAA the FEC and all the agencies and after it's a really wonderful story but it was really an American bird constituency with the threat of lawsuits that pushed it and that's the way things get done in America and after about a 10 year effort we at least got the lighting on towers changed to one that won't attract birds as much. At least the problem is that there's 50,000 powers and they're sort of grandfathered in with the old lighting system but as soon as they get updated theoretically that problem will go away the other thing is that with that problem but as the cities expanding from the 1950s and 60s when greater was doing that work the light dome from cities engulfed these towers that had the isolated aviation obstruction warning lights that attracted the birds and the death as they hit the guywires and I think the record was something like 25,000 birds in one night in Clare, Wisconsin but now it's not happening as much at those towers towers that used to kill thousands of birds a night are only killing a year are now only killing hundreds and these are the big tall TV tellers there's a guywires in the light you spring them in and they don't see the guywires so probably the reason we're not finding as many now is lower bird populations lower density there's still a lot of birds up there but lower than it was but also in order to study that light attraction problem you have to get into dark terrain and study towers and other light sources there can happen with a lot of other light sources too that's a great piece of historical information wonderful you just made my whole trip as the equipment becomes more person friendly I wonder if there's any possibility for citizens to get upon mountains all in a coordinated manner so that we can know as citizens in the end to apply pressure regarding the question about power installations we don't really know I think which mountains are always strong migratory leaves or whether the patterns change as they probably do with weather or whether there's some mountains that would make good sites for power and others we don't have that information and forget the companies they're not going to hire anyone anymore but what about the possibility of a citizen movement to begin to get the information by meaningful data pressure you're right on whether it's citizen or other forms of getting that data I mean certainly citizens can participate in it but you have to get the data and have it in place before the energy installation is proposed ideally because you're right you're not going to get the funding from the industry and if you are it'll be maybe a study right at that spot but they don't understand the bigger picture and in Vermont I can tell you just from my experience with other places nocturnal migration here is very complex because of the Montaigne terrain and how weather shapes wind currents in these valleys and things so it is literally unknown to anyone and maybe this station will be the first long term site in the state to start gathering data but where do you get and this is what Bill Cochran told me back in 1994 he got all excited about this idea of automatically monitoring these calls is that every additional station you have running simultaneously gives you different information like I did on Glee where you have one at the top and one at the bottom just those two stations you get a tremendous amount of information and so it wouldn't take that many stations if you've got six stations some up high and down low they're doing that in Montana the similar Montaigne terrain to try to understand and who's paying for it in that case you've got a guy that made a billion dollars in the stock market shorting out he's figured out some way to do it in very tiny milliseconds and he made all this money and then he got a good heart and he put it into buying ranches in the west and one of those ranches called MPG Ranch has he hired like 30 biologists there and one of the biologists really got the vision to study the migration through the calls and they have been a they've really helped develop the software in recent years so there are pockets of money out there it's not always clean you can do the best you can I had done that in one of the while I was still at Cornell in 1994 we put out a bunch of microphones like eight microphones in an array and then you triangulate the arrival times a bird-like call off to the side and the sound arrives at the closer microphones first by calculating those arrival time delays you can approximate where the big call comes from in the sky and and then you plot that you get hundreds and hundreds of calls and you plot that and you sort of get a pickup pattern with the microphone there's some of that on my on one of the publications that really hasn't in Cornell did a study after 11 and it's not, that's the way to do it but it hasn't been done very much the interesting thing I found was that a lot of warlords and sparrows were flying lower and well it was more but the Swains and Threshes were not flying low they were up high and it gets back to this whole idea of maybe echolocation they have a louder call and basically there's so much more that needs to be learned that is available to be learned and that is one that's a really good question about the pickup pattern on the microphone and how different species stratify in the atmosphere you might get geese and things like obviously much higher they typically sound higher when they're we're getting those all flights from Quebec to the mid-Atlantic whereas the warlords and sparrows this microphone only picks them up up to about a thousand feet we know that, that's a limitation whereas Threshes at least 2000 feet they have a louder call and geese probably up to 5000 feet so it's an index you get the data and you compare changes in the data through time to try to do it absolutely to calibrate exactly how much you're picking up varies of wind direction varies of humidity all sorts of things really nail it it's a very more intensive study than something like this and that's the same as the Breeding Birds survey where people are just going out and stopping every half mile for 3 minutes that's not very intensive but ultimately it gives us what we have right now is the best information in a long group of populations are increasing in climate I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole idea of identifying the flight call and the whole complication can you talk a little bit more about how you guys started to look at spectrograms and be like, yep, that goes together well, you know if you have a flock of geese what do you hear at the end? start with geese start with geese and then keep working put it warbler I worked on for 6 years and it took a long time and I went to a barrier island off the coast of Texas and waited for a fallout and I happened to get it, it was like April 6 one year and I got out there birds all over the dunes and everything and I found some hooded warblers there were three of them sitting in a bush a little tiny bush and I was waiting until they took off because oftentimes when they come in from the fallouts they come down in the rest after flying across the gulf the rest a little bit, they don't want to be out on those dunes and so they'll rest a little bit and then they'll fly out and look for a better habitat and I waited there and they took off and got the call and that one little 10th of a second opened the door because once I saw it, it was pretty unsteady it's just like it's just like those long evolutionary periods which came first at chicken or the egg it gets really nebulous but all I can tell you is if you keep working at it, you get better and there's a lot of stuff I don't know and it gets lumped in complex, it's like the zeep complex so you can like zeep sparrow like soup warblers the interesting thing is warblers and sparrows they have some overlaps some warblers can be like sparrows and place versus and it's like right now Connecticut warblers probably migrating over us but they have a zeep called it's just like black bull which is also migrating over us so if you hear a zeep, you don't know what you can't do Connecticut warblers at night you can't even confidently do black bull other than there's lots more of them when moving over so it's like analogy of a jigsaw puzzle you get the easy distinctive ones and things like swains and strush are very distinctive but you don't know one you know them all, that's the other problem and just because you hear something that sounds like something you recorded during the day you have to make sure there's nothing else out there that's not similar so it's like a jigsaw puzzle you work your way around and you base it on what the possibilities are you know a warbler call is not canada goose canada goose just can't do that so it's like that you know what it is and you also know what it is and you zero in on it well thank you, thanks for all the foundational work that you've done to give us like those audio files that give us some space to to have six years well that was just what I watched beast that's what I was doing all the time for every species though there's been some kind of visual confirmation well the real genius yeah, the real genius of the guy that michael brine and I put out in 2002 which is now I should say online if you go to publications here and I've heard there's two links, one is flight calls in eastern north america, Lambert's in eastern north america and there you can see the groundwork we did with getting the you know a bird ID during the day flying giving them call type we have those and then we have the hypothetic or presumed you know similar photographic ones that we've recorded that might be presumed are the same species which birds are you still working on or are you working on the time scale well some really interesting thing on wilson's warbler the western subspecies have a state of night flight calls for oven bird there's seven different kinds of calls it's male or female different populations and then it gets much more than that you get into how especially like something like henslow sparrow it's really hard to get their main flight call you know very unlikely to get it here but in new york you're still getting a few each population seems to have its own so it's all the same species but each population has its own type of flight call and the flight call is also the location call for most sparrows that they give during the day when they're in high brush you have anything when we put those cause we did a land bird flight call we put hummingbird chip notes on there and when I know that it was very short high notes I've never recorded anything that I thought was from hummingbird at night but you know they do come across the Gulf of Mexico if you're on like Fort Morgan down in alabama and you're waiting for the flight to come in from yucatan that morning you see hummingbirds coming in with the songbirds so I presume that they also migrated then has anybody been working I mean with the banding stations has anybody come up with a chip to be able to record on the actual bird the rest of the distance yeah a number of folks at powder mill banding station in near pittsburgh a guy in my plan zone who's now developed these little light locators and he's got a business supplying those for bird migration researchers around the world but he sort of started the bio acoustics program and what he did was he took the warablers that were banded and he held up for a little while in these cages and then he would record the calls that they made during the night now that was an idea that I had and when Dick Graver was still alive I went to see him in 1986 and unfortunately he had just had a stroke he could remember a lot from the early days in the 60's but when I gave him that idea I said well I know he does band birds and put him in cages and record these calls and he said well you can try that he's a very Jimmy Stewart like character sort of Illinois accent and he said well you know what you can do you can go to the tower kills and get the injured birds and do it with those I mean it wasn't that he was against banding but you know he was just a very sensitive man and that influenced me and so I never did that and it turns out that when you do put him in cages at night or some species you get zero information from and some species you do get it and you do make some progress that way so there's been a couple manuscripts and a lot I think so they weren't brought to the literature that made some progress I wasn't thinking of keeping them in a cage but just somehow being able to mic them Oh put a microphone on them well Bill Cochran Dick Raver's colleague at University of Illinois put the first microphones on any bird I think put them on slaints and thrushes you need to drive like crazy in a station well you got a speeding ticket he's in his late 80's he's a wonderful person he still lives in Champaign, Illinois and I mean his story is on track you know following migrating freshers or just lots of stuff written and I got some of his recordings of the slaints and thrush vocalizing and it transmits the sound to him in a station wagon driving I know what about Rupert Wills do you have further data on Rupert Wills? I don't know I've never recorded them in night migration I mean I know they migrate and we hear them calling preposkularly in mornings and in the evening they certainly don't give their whip a little while they're migrating they might give a little chucked note occasionally but a lot of species do migrate simultaneously and that I think is wonderful they've seen Nighthawk for pre-mociferous during the day in the fall I don't know some people have said they've seen Nighthawks here in the last week do you hear them calling at this time of year? I'm just curious do you hear at this time of year you're hearing that call? they seem to be silent the ones I've been seeing there but I kind of reported their flight call at night occasionally so it's possible Rupert Wills some of the species might make some sound I don't know species that migrate separately by gender do they have different night time? well the redwigs mostly by the day they do come across Gulf of Mexico with the night migrants so they could migrate at night too there's a lot of unknowns about that I think that the work of Mike Lanzone and Andy Farnsworth Cornell when they had the birds in cages showed that for some species there are differences between male and female and especially with the immature it's like rose breast to grow speed because the immature is a very distinctive night flight call versus the adults and cast the intern in one of those cases where you don't get the male and female but the prehistoric sort of narrative you'll hear those calls and then the high-pitched calls of the young with them in land areas at night migration so those are moving as family groups maybe the adults are showing young where to go in the night migration this might seem a little wrong to talk about but for years I studied hunk at Wales and I recorded them and then we would study them on spectrographs and I would do some fast forward many times and it sounds exactly like bird songs I've heard that please and probably similarly for bird songs when you slow it down it sounds like come back real fast in the lab where I first started to learn can you paint Chris Clark are you still working with Katie? a lot she's working in development now so that's where a lot of this software so I came to Cornell and first worked in the library of natural sounds in 1988 and then in 1994 came back as a lowercase of a laboratory that's associated with Collaborate with the Bioplosix program to develop software for automatically recognizing these calls Richard and I just talked to a fellow who wrote he wrote the first version of some of the software that has been used for that but anyway I see I've only got about 5 minutes or our next speaker comes on here so I'm going to give her a time to get set up I'd love to talk to you afterwards thank you very much