Hi Tweets,

Don Cecile writes:

(snip)
>Difficult questions to answer but certainly very interesting to entertain.
>It would seem to me that one potential way to answer this question of
>echolocation would be to examine the auditory organs and their respective
>functions of the seabirds in question.
>In order for organisms to echolocate, there must be a few key features that
>need to be present in the ear and functioning... something about detecting
>interaural time differences, amplitudes....if the appropriate conditions
>were right (in terms of having the right hardware) then it would be worth
>conducting experiments.

Why not just hang a hydromike from a buoy in an area where there's lots of
wintering grebes and loons and known feeding areas and run the tape for a
few nights? That would be sure to pick up sounds of bill-clicks,
vocalisations, even their hidden sonic activities such as surreptitious
barber-shop quartets ;-) Beats sticking stuff in their ear.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net