With tree leaf out, my views of the horizon are now limited, and so I’m not getting many distant flybys. Hoping for lots of migrants now, during the peak of migration–but daytime migration has been almost absent in my neighborhood.
Fortunately, birds are flying over each night, so the strategy for maximizing species detections now shifts to my trusty OldBird21c microphone!
A few of the new birds for the year detected so far with my microphone include Hermit Thrush, Veery, Swanson’s Thrush, Black-billed Cuckoo, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Pine Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Ovenbird, Least Sandpiper, Spotted Sandpiper, Solitary Sandpiper, American Bittern, Green Heron, Black-crowned Night Heron, Savannah Sparrow. Some of these are really great yard birds–hard to get herons and shorebirds any other way 2 miles from the reservoir!
Here’s a sample of a recording–Black-billed Cuckoo giving a garbled flight call followed by a normal daytime call.
It takes a long time to review a full night’s recording manually in Audacity on my MacBook Pro. But I’m slowly going to go through them all, and report what I can identify on eBird. Here’s a couple sample checklists from the night of May 10 (PM) to May 11 (AM).
Fortunately, these identifications are based on recordings that can be reviewed by others. Unfortunately, unless I’m listening live to the recording, they can’t be entered into my normal eBird account and so they don’t boost my normal eBird yard list totals.
But this is a bionic big year, so I get to add my personal yard list as well as the OldBird21c microphone list together for my Backyard Big Year total.
Stay tuned for more discoveries of yard birds that go bump, zeep, or buzz in the night!
