ML144599411
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Sounds
- Song
- Playback
- Playback not used
Media notes
Audio extracted from video clip 2b.
Observation details
Continuing bird first found by Geoff Hill on 2/21/2019. We all arrived at the site at 6:25 when it was still a good bit dark and foggy, and we eventually deployed to Melvin Road, between the 2nd and 4th poles east of Flint River School Road listening for the bird. We started hearing the meadowlark singing just south of Melvin Road and a little to the east at 7:18. Just before 7:28 the bird moved more directly in front of us, between us and the west edge of what is left of the ponded water out in the field, about 250-300 feet south of Melvin, and perched up completely unobstructed and quite in the open for us! We were all completely flabbergasted when The Meadowlark literally teed right up for us so well and commenced to sing. Between 7:28 and 7:40 we were able to observe and video the bird pretty much constantly singing directly in front of us, albeit at some distance. At about 7:40 the meadowlark flew up onto the dirt mound by where we had parked the cars and stayed there for about 8 minutes and sang some as well! It then moved north to just west of Flint River School Road by the intersection of Melvin and Flint River School (perching once on a wire). Pretty immediately though it started working its way east down Melvin (perching once on a wire) and then we lost it not far out in the field north of Melvin at about the 4th pole east of the paved road. --- Extensive yellow on malar, whitish flanks with sparse spotting instead of streaking. Comparatively pale yellow underparts. --- I was able to get some usable handheld phonescoped video clips of the bird singing, audio inclusive. The videos are sometimes pretty shaky but still usable and the sound is good but may need to be turned up a bit, there is some videographer, traffic and background noise. Much of the video is at 75x plus max iPhone digital zoom (maybe 375x digital equivalent) which explains the shakes and quality. I thought it might be more important to have as close-up footage as possible at the expense of video quality, but there is a little footage in the videos that is max optical zoom only, and a little less shaky. --- From all of the footage captured I selected 5 video segments (Apple MOV files), 4 audios (WAV files, audio extracted from the video clips) and 9 video still frame screen captures (JPG files) of the bird from this session, all are available on my Box site directly at https://app.box.com/s/uxubjn8xt0wifcdzl6quiezt5nhoziyi or go to http://app.box.com/shared/2yxtdkm3ta and look in the 030919 Western Meadowlark Macon County GA folder The entire folder can be downloaded and then unzipped as well. If you need to you can sort the Box page by name by clicking on Name at the top left of the page and then look for 030919. --- Handheld phonescoped video and still frames may be best viewed on a large screen and/or zoomed or at the biggest size possible. Information concerning how to use Apple MOV movie files can be read in my MOV Video File How-To.txt available at: http://www.box.com/s/ojj2lap6sayrj83n9zzx Some of the video files on the site can be a bit large and may take some minutes to download if you don't have high-speed internet access, but it may be best to download them to your desktop or somewhere on your computer before running them in QuickTime (or your MOV player). That way they should run faster and you can keep them if you like them too. Being handheld and usually at a very high magnification they can sometimes get a little jittery, but they are still worth a look, especially since you can drag through frame by frame in QuickTime (or in your MOV player) and pause the video on the best parts, playing at half speed in QuickTime can also be a good idea. --- In this case if video/audio playback skips or runs slowly, due to combined video and audio playback, reducing the video playback window size may help a lot. This may also help a little with the jitters.
Technical information
- Recorder
- iPhone 7
- Microphone
- Accessories
- Original file size
- 14.35 MB