Wildlife Acoustics experiences with their automated recorders (1 Viewer)

[Elkhornsun]

I am looking for a recorder that is "voice" activated to be able to record birds while they are making their calls and not have hours of recordings that have no bird noise. In particular I would like to record the owls at night and I have at least three species around my property.

Song Meter Mini Wildlife Audio Recorder

Our smallest, lightest and most affordable wildlife audio recorder gives scientists an innovative, tool for monitoring birds, frogs and other vocal wildlife.

www.wildlifeacoustics.com

 

[Jon.Bryant]

I have the Wildlife Acoustic recorders. I like them, but as far as I am aware, none have acoustic triggers for normal audio recordings. The Mini-BAT has an ultrasonic trigger, but this wouldn’t work for birds.

I doubt if there are any devices out there with acoustic triggers - after all, you can fit a lot of audio on a reasonable sized card. Also environments are surprisingly noisy, so you would probably get a lot of false positives - some bug sat on my recorder in PNG and must have been very close to the mic, because it sounded as loud as a chainsaw in the recording!

It is pretty quick to load the sound files into something like Audacity and visually scan for calls by looking at the sonogram. I do this a lot, and it doesn’t take long at all to scan a sonogram of an hour recording for ‘good vocals’ - the Wildlife Acoustic recorders split recordings into hour long files, so the main problem is having to open 8 or so files for each night of recordings.

The other thing is that passive recorders tend to be 16 bit (WA’s all are), so gain levels are important and have to be ‘guessed’ in advance. If you have owls close in the garden, then it may take a bit of trial and error, to stop loosing recording due to clipping.

 

[Joop99]

The Tascam recorders are voice activated. I have the Tascam DR-60DmkII, you can set start and stop with four levels. The other models are DR-05X, DR-07X and DR-40X. You can go to the Tascam site and download the manuals in order to see if one of these recorders is what you want.

 

[Jon.Bryant]

In particular I would like to record the owls at night and I have at least three species around my property.

As a matter of chance, I was just processing some SM Mini recordings from Bhutan and like this Himalayan Owl recording, so thought I would share it to give you an idea of the quality of the SM Mini for the type of stuff you are looking to do. The owl was not actually that close, so in the un-edited recording (where I have boosted to -5db only), there is a fair bit of noise. In the other recording I have used Spectral Layers noise reduction.

It was very easy to find all the good calls of the owl in each hour-long recording, just by looking at the sonograms.

Obviously, if you can get closer to your owls, the signal to noise would be a lot better.

Himalayan Owl (un-edited)
Himalayan Owl (with noise reduction)