Saturday, May 16, 2009

fish crow, take 1

Since it took forever to get my computer to take the video I'm just going to post this without any extensive discussion since it's going to take a little bit of time to collect my thoughts. The video is just over 20 seconds long as we saw the bird for the 3rd time. It essentially flies down the road toward the landfill. I pointed the microphone of the (Canon A620) camera at the bird rather than the lens since I wanted to maximize the ability to document the most identifiable aspect (the voice) so it's never visible (the microphone is on top of my camera).

At the 6 second mark you glimpse Tim also videoing the bird. At the 8 second mark you hear me say "ca, ca" trying to stimulate a response as it's directly overhead. At the 17 (almost 18) second mark you hear the bird say "ca-ha." After that I say "Did you get it? It called," and Tim replies "Yep."

It's probably 75 yards away when it calls, just out of sight over the trees as it headed to the landfill.

The brief caveat, my camera doesn't record the very high pitches very well. If you scroll down the margin of the blog you'll see 2 warbler recordings I've made with it. The hooded warbler comes out well, the prairie warbler sounds like it goes down not up even though it was singing a typical song. That being said, when I listened to the recording immediately after hearing the bird I thought it was a pretty good representation of what we heard.

Hopefully others agree on the ID...

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