Bird songs of the RMBL

Common bird songs from The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

Recordings: Daniel T. Blumstein, Chiron Otero, Kathleen Pesheck with identification help from Chris Floyd

We are developing hardware and software to detect common RMBL birds and, as part of this, we needed to create an acoustic library of the birds. This work in progress is partially supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation (IDBR-0754247 to Blumstein, and DBI-0821369 to the RMBL).

The songs were digitally recorded in May, June and July 2009, mostly using a SongMeter (with its integrated microphone) or a Marantz PMD-660 Solid State Recorder (with a Sennheiser ME-67 microphone). A few were recorded with a Sony MZ-M200 mini-disk recorder (and the stereo microphone that accompanies it). In all cases, they were saved as 16-bit, 44.1 kHz .aif files.

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory is located in Colorado's upper East River valley and there is considerable background noise in the bottom of the valley. Some of the birds (particularly those made with the SongMeter) are relatively quiet compared to the background noise. Spectrograms were made in Raven, and the contrast was adjusted to illustrate song structure. Most are plotted on the same axes to facilitate comparison and, for some, we have different song and call types. Individual variation for some of these species is profound. Click on a spectrogram to listen to the song. You may use these recordings or spectrograms for any non-commerical purpose as long as you attribute, or link to, this site.

House Wren