ML43510041
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Sounds
- Call
- Playback
- Playback not used
Media notes
Vocalizations by three owls. One tooted consistently throughout the recording. A second made "ksew" calls and wavering wails. The third produced upward slurring sounds that vaguely resemble those of a spotted owl. I've got other recordings of NSWOs making the latter sounds, but I also compared them with spotted owl and western screech owl sounds and found that they don't match well. The latter sounds have also been recorded from northern saw-whet owls in Massachusetts by Tim Spahr where spotted owls and western screech owls do not occur. There are also human voices from two hikers in the recording. Trimmed and amplified by 10 dB.
Observation details
One bird was tooting spontaneously when I arrived. Less than one minute later it stopped, so I whistled an imitation and soon heard it again. About three minutes later, while I was recording the tooting, I heard other sounds that audio spectrograms show were two more northern saw-whet owls vocalizing simultaneously in the same general area. The recordings below are a bit hard to hear so I recommend using headphones or earbuds. It turns out that the sensitivity level on the recorder was accidentally set at "low," which explains why the original recordings were hard to hear.
Technical information
- Recorder
- Sony PCM-M10
- Microphone
- Sennheiser ME67
- Accessories
- Original file size
- 13.9 MB