I’ve been getting some sound recordings on the iPhone recently just to see what the quality is like and to generally enhance the quality and comprehensiveness of my wildlife records. I upload the recordings to eBird, where they end up in the Cornell Lab Macaulay Library and xeno-canto, which are wildlife media archives that are of use for scientific research, particularly in the ever growing bioacoustics space. I’m happy for my recordings to make a tiny contribution to the datasets that are used in this research and as a quid-pro-quo for being citizen scientists we great great tools to use like BirdNet-Analyzer for processing passive acoustic recordings of nocturnal bird migration and the Merlin App which is primarily for identifying birds from their calls and songs but which I’ve been using for the sound recording.
At the moment I’m doing nothing more technical than starting the recording in Merlin and pointing the microphone towards the bird! Obviously, the closer to the bird the better without disturbing it and the quieter the environment the better. As the microphone is in my hand, any movement is picked up as sound, so staying as still as possible also improves the recording. I may enhance this setup with an external microphone at some point to improve the quality further but overall I’m quite pleased with the results I’m getting.
I upload the recordings from the phone to the computer and do some minor editing in Audacity, to remove handling noise, normalise the volume and if absolutely necessary a bit of noise reduction.
Here’s some of the local passerines getting into song in early Spring.
The air was full of Siskins and Redpolls calling as I walked up Longridge Fell in the early morning on 13 March and this male was in full song a few metres away by the path in a spruce tree.
A little further along the track a Treecreeper was singing
This Reed Bunting was singing by Dean Clough reservoir on 14 March
And this Stonechat was belting it out by the roadside at Parsonage reservoir on 16 March.