Subject: [Tweeters] (no subject)
Date: Jul 26 10:19:40 2005
From: Jay Withgott - withgott at comcast.net



OBOL & Tweeters --

For those of you attending or considering attending this year's
Western Field Ornithologists meeting, below are descriptions of two
exciting workshops we have added to the program, one of them run by
Oregon's own Arch McCallum. Hope to see you there,

Jay Withgott
withgott at nasw.org
Portland, OR


The 30th Annual Meeting of Western Field Ornithologists in Santa
Maria, California will have two unique workshops especially designed
to enhance field skill for biologists, surveyors and monitors,
ornithologists and interested birders of all backgrounds. John
"Jack" Muir Laws will give a course in field sketching and bird
documentation and Arch McCallum will be doing a specialized sounds
workshop. Both workshops are described below. Registration and
meeting information are on the WFO website at www.wfo-cbrc.org.

Field Sketching: Learning to Sketch and Document Birds in the Field

Two sessions: Friday morning, 30 September, and Saturday morning, 1 October
8:30-11:20 AM

Workshop led by John Muir Laws, Author and Associate of the
California Academy of Sciences

Learn the beginning steps to capturing the feeling of the living
organism while including the details critical for identification.
This workshop is designed to help the beginning and intermediate
field ornithologist, biologist, or sketch artist develop drawing
skills for use in the field. This course will help you hone in on the
points of identification so that you can quickly document, in the
field, those frequently fast-moving birds. Bring drawing paper,
pencils, eraser and a portable hard surface, such as a clipboard, for
drawing. Course may be taken as a single-day or as a two-day course.

John (Jack) Muir Laws has worked as an environmental educator for
over 25 years in California, Wyoming, and Alaska. He teaches classes
on natural history, conservation biology, scientific illustration,
and field sketching. He currently is creating an illustrated field
guide to more than 1200 species of plants and animals of the Sierra
Nevada. In the summer of 2004, he published Sierra Birds: A Hiker's
Guide. He is also a regular contributor to Bay Nature magazine with
his "Naturalists Notebook" column.

Birding by Ear Visually!

Saturday morning 1 October 2005 only

Workshop led by Arch McCallum, Ph.D.,

Most birders and field ornithologists are visual learners, but during
the breeding season land birds are 9 times more likely to be heard
than seen. For those of us who have to relearn songs and calls every
year, a visual aid to remembering the hundreds of song-types and
call-types around us would be really useful. The sound spectrogram
(also known as sonogram) is such an aid. In the first segment of this
workshop I will show you how spectrograms represent different
qualities of sound, how spectrograms reveal the vocal gymnastics of
avian sound production (e.g., singing two songs at once), and how
spectrograms elucidate the organization of notes into phrases,
phrases into songs, and songs into bouts. In the second segment, we
will use spectrogram-based training programs to learn the
song-phrases and calls of Empidonax flycatchers. In the final
segment, we will discuss recording equipment, and participants with
their own recordings can digitize and visualize them. Recommended
reading: Don Kroodsma's The Singing Life of Birds.

Workshop schedule

8:30-9:20 AM: Visualizing sound with spectrograms. This will be
mainly a slide-illustrated audiovisual presentation. Spectrograms are
like musical scores. I will show you how to interpret them with
examples from both bird song and human music. After seeing what such
terms as "pure," "sweet," "harsh," and "buzzy" look like, we will
look at the organization of bird song into notes, phrases, songs, and
bouts. Each of these levels of organization is critical in the
identification of some species, and we will see and hear examples of
each. Participants are encouraged to ask questions and share
experiences throughout this presentation.

9:20-9:40 AM: Break

9:40-10:20 AM: Learning sounds with spectrograms. We will use the
sounds of Empidonax flycatchers to explore the usefulness of learning
sounds by simultaneously hearing them and viewing spectrograms.
First, I will point out the diagnostic spectrographic differences in
the song phrases and call notes of these sibling species. Then, we
will do training exercises that present sound and spectrogram
together. Finally, we will assess what we have learned with a couple
of quizzes.

10:20-10:40: Break

10:40-11:20: Equipment for recording and digitizing. I will briefly
discuss and demonstrate inexpensive recording equipment and its use
for recording birds in the field, then we will explore the potential
of any equipment you may already have on hand. You are encouraged to
bring portable recording equipment such as headphones, microphones
(e.g., clip-on lapel microphone), and especially recorders (e.g.,
camcorder, minidisc recorder, pocket voice recorder, 25-year-old
cassette recorder). We will record some test sounds in the meeting
room, then digitize them and check out their quality on the computer.
If you have bird sounds you have already recorded, by all means bring
them, and we will digitize and view them spectrographically.

Arch McCallum is an ornithologist who has worked as an interpretive
naturalist and college professor and is now a conservation-oriented
bioacoustics consultant working out of Eugene, Oregon. His current
work includes projects on the Breeding Bird Survey in Maryland,
management of the Tricolored Blackbird in California, and individual
recognition of Bonin Petrels in Hawaii, all based on bird sounds.