Hi all
This morning at the Wheaton Branch Stormwater Ponds, I had a single Red Crossbill fly over, calling. It kept going, in the direction of Georgia Ave. I was able to get a recording and the spectrographic analysis of the calls appears to show the 'lightning bolt" shape of type 3. �Details and links to soundcloud file and spectrograms are in the eBird checklist:�http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S12155392
Then this afternoon, a little before 1pm, we were returning to our car at Hughes Hollow when a single White-winged Crossbill treated us to it's own vocal flyover. Again, details in the eBird checklist:�http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S12155391
There's also a link to a soundfile. Several crossbill calls can be heard faintly in the background, over the cardinal calls and me "shhhh"-ing my partner!
In case anyone is interested in how I made the recordings... I got tired of trying to pull my iphone and launch the recording app everytime I heard something interesting - invariably, a calling flyover finch would be gone by the time I was live. To solve this issue, I invested in a small digital recorder (mine's a Zoom H1, available from Amazon etc). With this small, light device, I can set it to begin recording when I start birding, then leave it recording for the entire outing with its mics sticking out of my breast pocket. I mostly end up with an mp3 full of wind noise and me stomping through the undergrowth, cursing etc. However, on those occasions when something interesting does fly over, the H1 often picks up something of use, which I can extract from the big hours-long file once I'm home in front of the computer. If nothing exciting happens during my walk then I just delete the recording and the device is ready to go again next time. Kinda fun!
I'd like to sign off with a word of thanks and appreciation to our amazing eBird reviewers. These fine people give of their time and expertise to help us be more accurate in our observations. They sort through all this junk for us and whether the outcome is accept, reject or whatever, its all a great learning opportunity. Cheers folks!
S
Stephen J. Davies
Silver Spring, MD
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Flickr:�http://www.flickr.com/photos/chlorophonia/
Blog:�http://chlorophonia.blogspot.com/�
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