Xeno-Canto; Sharing Bird Songs From Around the World And Investigating a Victorian Ornithological Adornment
"One winter morning the President electrified his nervous Cabinet by bursting into a meeting with, 'Gentlemen, do you know what has happened this morning?' They waited with bated breath as he announced, 'Just now I saw a Chestnut-sided Warbler and this is only February.' "
— Corine Roosevelt Robinson (on her brother Theodore Roosevelt)
A birding walk on the Filoli estate in Woodside, California a few years ago and inspiration from an unknown warbler some weeks ago in our backyard, led us to this site. Regardless of your attachment to birding, the search might of be of interest to all who hear a song and wonder about the singer. Here are some of the new species entered onto the site:
Green Sandpiper
Canivet's Emerald
Yellow-throated Longclaw
Sharpe's Pied Babbler
Rufous-cheeked Laughingthrush
Looking at Xeno-Canto's home page brings up the following intriguing questions about particular bird songs and what follows is an answer to the questions how the website is organized:
"Perhaps you have shared our frustration of sifting through your sound collection without ever finding the bird you recorded. Although an enormous amount of recordings are available on tape or even CDROM, they usually do not allow you to set up a sensible search strategy, in other words they are not true guides. This is odd, because of the great importance of songs in clinching ID's and in locating species in forests."
"The classification of birds in field guides is based on shared characteristics and usually leads to a reasonably fast convergence to a species, or genus, even in the tropics. For plants, elaborate decision trees exist that lead you to a certain species(group). For some areas such as Europe completely different decision trees even exist, allowing several independent lines of attack."
"The idea here is to do something similar for bird sounds. A set of simple characteristics has been chosen: the only instrument needed to determine them is a (stop)watch. More sophisticated and interesting ways of characterising and comparing the sounds exist, and we are planning to develop those here as time progresses, hopefully with your help."
"What these characteristics will do is limit the number of choices that you have, and more importantly bring together sounds that somehow sound similar, regardless of whether the species producing them are related or not."
Regions covered are the Americas, Asian, Africa, Europe and Australasia. Both English and Latin names are used to identify the birds. Be careful or you'll find yourself in the Mysteries section populated by recordings of unknown birds and unable to leave. Meeting the members of the site could perhaps be the most interesting aspect of Xeno-Canto.
When looking through one of our favorite site, London's Victoria and Albert Museum, we happened upon the following, clearly not a fashion approach that would be approved of by the birding community nowadays. The use of bird plumage has been an environmental has been a cause of the Audubon Society for many years, beginning with the prohibition in New York State in 1910: NY State legislature enacts Audubon Plumage Law, prohibiting sale or possession of feathers from protected bird species.
Pages: 1 · 2
More Articles
- The Beige Book Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions By Federal Reserve District Wednesday November 30, 2022
- A la Frank Sinatra: "Come Fly With Me", U.S. Department of Transportation Airline Customer Service Dashboard
- Ferida's Wolff's Backyard: A Nest!
- Adrienne G. Cannon Writes: Those Lonely Days
- From the CDC: When You've Been Fully Vaccinated You Can ........For the 30,000,000 Who Have Been Vaccinated
- Jill Norgren Reviews a New Inspector Gamache Mystery: All the Devils Are Here
- In the We Couldn't Resist Category: Just Icing on the Cake, Part One, by Roberta McReynolds
- FactCheck Post: The Facts on Trump’s Travel Restrictions: "We Don't Have a Travel Ban; We Have a Travel Band-Aid Right Now"
- Heard of the Novel Corona Virus Before? The New England Journal of Medicine's Free Reading Lists and the W.H.O.'s Statement
- Horse, Horse, Tiger, Tiger; It's the Tone of the Character That Makes the Word