Category Archives: Audio

August 8, 2024 · 23:41

Begging Call

I’ve been hearing something flying around at night that had me stumped for a while. I’ll hear the great horned owls hooting fairly often, and I’ll occasionally see them. (They’re spectacular!)

But this isn’t hooting, it’s more of a screech, and a couple of different types of screeches. I finally got the Cornell Merlin app to hear enough of one sort of sound and identify it as a barn owl instead of a great horned owl. Fair, good to know, it would be great to see one, but so far I’m just hearing it.

But the other screeching sound? Not so much.

Until tonight. Our bird was right across the street on top of the power pole there, then later in our pine trees in the back yard. I was finally able to get a good recording for the Merlin app to chew on.

You can hear calls about every eighteen or nineteen seconds before it flys away and fades out on the fourth call. I got a glimpse of it as it flew off – it’s a large animal, must be fantastic to see.

Merlin ID’s it as a great horned owl, but instead of the normal hooting call, this is referred to as a “begging call.” You hear it from a juvenile that’s left the nest and is learning to hunt, but still used to screeching when it’s hungry so that mom or dad can bring food for it.

It’s the owl version of “Adulting sucks!”

The Long-Suffering Wife wants to help it out since she’s used to throwing out bird seed for the songbirds and having me fill the feeders for the hummingbirds. I explained that owls are carnivores – her solution was to give it some shredded chicken. I’m thinking that the owl is looking for something more alive and warm – obviously I’m not thinking outside the box properly, since it’s been explained to me that I could microwave some chicken and then go stand out in the back yard and wiggle and wave it around so that it looks alive.

The hungry, screaming, pissed off juvenile owl probably needs to just find one of the neighborhood rabbits and learn to catch its own dinner. Sorry!

 

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February 15, 2024 · 23:09

Coyotes In The Night

I walked out into the back yard about 22:15 tonight, to a chaotic cacophony. I hear coyotes around once or twice a week, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard them this close. They were in the street and yards on the road just below ours, where it loops around and heads back down. So, maybe a hundred yards as the crows fly.

(As usual with cell phone video uploaded to YouTube, the sound quality sucks, so turn it up a bit…)

I walked over to the edge of the hill and could see four or five of them running around, but from the volume and yipping and yapping and howling, there might have been twice that. I don’t know what they were carrying on about (i.e., trying to kill and eat) but I’m glad it wasn’t a pet of mine.

Or a skunk.

Life in the urban jungle!

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October 31, 2023 · 23:27

Halloween 2023

We live at the top of a hill. A big hill. A really steep hill. This is one of the key reasons that we have, in five or six Halloweens here, gotten maybe one or two trick-or-treaters, TOTAL.

It’s sad. At the old house on Pomelo we were on flat ground, near the local elementary school, and we would take out the telescopes in the front yard when possible and let folks look at whatever was up while we handed out candy. We got hundreds of trick-or-treaters every year. If it were cloudy and we didn’t have the telescopes out we would have people all night asking where they were.

Here? This year, as busy as I am, I didn’t even have the time or effort to put out a single Halloween decoration. Nor did a single house anywhere climbing up the hill. Plenty of lights and inflatables and gigantic spiders and 12′ skeletons and some really nice displays down on the flat streets at the bottom of the hill. But get up past the first two or three houses? Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Except for the owls. They were in the spirit of the holiday! Two of them, right across the street, with a third way off in the distance down the canyon.

Being NaNoWriMo Eve, the other question is whether or not I’m going to be stupid enough to try it again. As mentioned, I’m busier than dog, and while I’m finally at a point where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (I think, could be an oncoming train) on a couple of major projects that I’ve been working on for months, there are others that are just starting up.

Curiously, I’ve seen this diagram popping up from a couple of different folks on social media in the last week:

(No idea who created this.)

I see nothing inaccurate about this. It would be wise to pay attention.

So, of course, there’s about a 90% chance that I’ll at least start a NaNoWriMo project tomorrow. My odds of completing it are about the same as the odds of winning the lottery. But I can’t do it if I don’t get started, so I’ll probably get started.

May the odds be always in my favor?

 

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Filed under Audio, Birds, Writing

September 15, 2023 · 22:54

Lopping Off The Local Roost

A week ago I shared pictures of a couple dozen crows roosting in the top of a pine tree a couple houses down the street.

The local great horned owls also use that tree regularly.

Someone wasn’t happy with that tree’s condition however.

The good news is that they kept the bottom part of the tree, where the needles haven’t fallen off and the branches aren’t bare.

The bad news is that the roost for the birds is gone.

I understand that something was destroying the tree (some insect infestation or disease?) and they wanted to save what they could. I approve. And the owls are still out there almost every night, it’s not like that was their only perch or worse, where they had a nest. I guess I’m just dealing with a bit much change at the moment and could have done without this little addition to the list.

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June 24, 2023 · 23:33

Hawks, More Hawks, And Ravens – OH MY!

It started with the distinctive cry of a Cooper’s Hawk in the back yard, along with the squawking of several ravens. The hawk was close, somewhere in those big pine trees on the hill behind the house. I quickly pulled up the Cornell Labs Merlin app (you need this app too!) and started an audio recording with the app identifying the birds as it hears them.

You can hear the Cooper’s Hawk at the very beginning, over the sound of the screen door closing, and again (much more clearly) at the 01:06 mark.

I had set the phone down and grabbed my camera, looking for the Cooper’s Hawk, when from behind me (at the 00:57 mark) I heard a Red-tailed Hawk, then a second one. This pair is familiar! They were close and getting closer, flying right over my head into the trees where the ongoing fight was happening.

As a helicopter goes over you can hear chirping and calls from all three hawks, as well as the ravens still harassing them. The ravens finally forced them out of the trees, the Cooper’s Hawk going down into the canyon behind us where its nest is and the Red-tailed Hawks climbing back into the thermals over Valley Circle Boulevard.

Notice the missing feathers on this hawk’s right wing. I would have thought they would have grown back by now, but it’s become an identifying mark on this particular magnificent bird, one that’s easily seen even when it’s several hundred feet in the air and a half mile or more away.

Spectacular!

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August 12, 2022 · 23:41

The Owl Returns

I mentioned a few days ago that I realized that I hadn’t heard the owls in a while.

Last night, at least one of them was back, loud and proud, right across the street.

I’ve taken out the 18 to 20 seconds of traffic noises, sirens, and low flying aircraft in between each hoot, turning about 120 seconds real time into 26 seconds of hooting.

I’m glad they’re back – I hope more follow. I love it when three or four of them get hooting across the canyons.

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April 17, 2022 · 21:49

“Clicking” Hummingbird Calls

I’ve a couple of times tried to post audio tracks here of the “clicking” sounds that hummingbirds make. I’m going to try that again today because I think I’ve succeeded in getting some better tools and producing a better product to share.

For whatever reason, tonight the hummingbird “clicking” songs outside in the back were particularly loud and energetic. From inside the house, in the living room at the front of the house, it sounded like that ticking noise you get when the oven or furnace is heating up sometimes, but much faster. When I went back into the kitchen, I could then clearly hear from the open back door that it was the hummingbirds.

I tried recording the audio and video on my iPhone and was pleased with the result. I can clearly hear this high-pitched clicking, and can also hear the loud, lower-pitched “zoom” or “buzz” as they’re flitting around. Another good thing was that it wasn’t just Little Bastard, the very territorial male Anna’s Hummingbird that’s been driving all of the others off. There were four of them out there at once at the two feeders. I don’t know if something happened to Little Bastard and the others were moving back in (it was dark, I couldn’t see their coloration) or if maybe Little Bastard gave in to hormones and now has a harem with whom he’s sharing “his” feeders. Either way, there were a bunch of hummers and that could explain all of the “clicking.”

When I came in and listened to the audio, I could hear everything quite clearly. There’s a dog bark in there at one point early on and one of the house wrens sounding off because I’m standing near their nest (they’re up in the porch rafters over the spare refrigerator) but for the most part you can hear the clicking and the zooming quite clearly. I was very pleased.

Then I transferred the file to my desktop computer. And I was not pleased at all.

I’ve bitched about this at least a couple times in the past. When the iPhone compresses the video to transfer it off to another system, the algorithm used is VERY heavily weighted toward the bass end of the audio spectrum. So the result on the desktop was like I was standing next to a running car or A/C unit, with just a tiny little bit of the high-frequency clicks audibel far, far in the background. This sort of sucked!

***deep, calming breath time***

After a bit of reflection a little voice said to me:

  • I recorded this on what is essentially a handheld super computer, with a gazillion apps available
  • I have desktop systems that are top of the line, also with a gazillion programs available, including some pretty decent audio and video editing utilities. I may not have a lot of experience with them and I may not know exactly what I’m doing, but…
  • I’m a bright guy with a fair amount of at least decent, “advanced amateur” experience in editing and creating audio, video, images, and almost 50 years of computer and IT experience
  • So, in theory, shouldn’t I be able to rip the audio track off of the video on my iPhone, upload that audio file to my desktop, use one of my audio editing programs to re-adjust the equilization to lower the background hum of the bass that the iPhone wants to put in there and bring back out the high-frequency sounds from the hummingbirds?
  • The answer to that would be, “YES!” At least, I think it is.

Try this and tell me if you can hear what I’ve described:

It’s a 25 second clip, with the dog barking at 1.6 seconds and the house finch sounding off at 7.2 seconds. All throughout there’s constant “clicking,” with the “zoomy buzzing” at about 5 to 10 seconds, 12 seconds, and 24 seconds.

Can you hear it? I really hope so. Please et me know.

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