Click image to listen to this Eastern Phoebe recorded in West Virginia in April 2020, and housed in the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Once upon a lovely June day in eastern Massachusetts, a male Eastern Phoebe set out to find a mate. With his sweet and distinctive voice, he began each day with a pre-dawn chorus, starting as early as 4:30am. His burst of song activity lasted only a few days, focused around June 5-9 and by June 20 his voice was missing from the soundscape (we hope this means he successfully found a mate). On one day, he was recorded singing over 1,700 times. Looking at the data heatmap above (the darker the square, the more vocalizations he made during that 15 minute period), we also think he participated in a dusk chorus… what do you think?
The blue spectrogram above is a visual representation of one of his songs, recorded by the Haikubox at 5am on June 9. You can compare it to the black and white spectrogram of an Eastern Phoebe recording (West Virginia, 2020) housed in the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Haikubox’s ability to automatically and continuously identify bird songs and calls means it captures and counts nearly every bird song and call. It’s potential contribution to scientific discovery by harnessing community science can’t be overstated.
Many other bird stories await discovery within the massive Haikubox dataset. We are working on ways to analyze and visualize the millions of birdsong identifications collected by Haikuboxes around North America (and a few European test sites). One visualization we tried (inspired by one of our European beta testers) was a racing bar chart. This soundscape visualization is visually dense even with only 10 species, so feel free to slow it down, rewatch portions, or skip through the quiet dusk to dawn period. Most interesting to us were the mid-afternoon quiet period, the really early birds (Northern Cardinal and Gray Catbird), and which birds were not very vocal or didn’t participate in a dawn chorus on these days.
These visualizations were all created with data downloaded from the Haikubox listen website from June 2022. All Haikubox owners can download their own data by visiting the “All” page. We encourage community science, and would love to see how our customers use their data and what they learn from it.
Haikubox-collected count of the number of identified Eastern Phoebe songs or calls in June 2022.