Sorry, not a field I know about.  Mark

I hope you will find some info. you look for here: https://bioacoustics.tern.org.au/about

Hi Duncan. We use portable audio-recording equipment on a regular basis for our survey work. Our units are made in Qld in Australia (Frontier Labs) and are very hardy. There are other manufacturers of similar equipment including Wildlife Acoustics. The software used to analyse calls does require a certain amount of interaction including the use of "reference" calls for comparison. However, I am assuming that you are comparing call dialects within the same species over geographic ranges. The comparison is time intensive and is probably something done in a comfortable and quiet environment (essentially your review your recordings and then compare call structures). Wildlife Acoustics has software that can make picking out calls a little easier for very long recordings (it can save hours of tedium) but similar software is available around the traps (e.g., Raven from Cornell). Just to make your own life easier, be very focused on the question you are asking and try and rationalise your survey design. You do not want hundreds of hours of recording with lots of background noise to have to listen and classify. Which brings me to the point of white noise (i.e., background noise). Try and record calls in the least noisiest environment. It will make it easier.

This example to give you an idea of how we survey using audio recorders. When we need to survey for night birds we set up recording schedules for 1 hours before dusk and 2 hours after dusk (sunset and sunrise are geographically calculated variables). We also record for 2 hours prior to sunrise and 1 hour after sunrise. The recordings occur on consecutive days (up to 7 days). This method will capture most night-bird calls and allow us to listen to the morning and evening chorus for most diurnal species. However, we schedule our recordings on the biology of the target species, e.g., there are some species we would need to start recording at least 1 hour after sunset and would continue until no more than 2 hours prior to sunrise.

I hope this little bit of info will get you started.

Thanks Rion and Eddy, useful start!

Regards, Duncan

Record vocalizations with a Sony TCM-5000 portable cassette tape recorder with

a Sennhauser short shotgun microphone. The strong microphone is key.

ARBIMON.

ARBIMON acoustics / Sieve Analytics Inc.

https://www.sieve-analytics.com/ 

Sieve Analytics consists of two web-applications for collecting, analyzing, and presenting biodiversity (ARBIMON-acoustic) and land use data (Land Mapper).

In Puerto Rico has being used for the ID of endangered species, such as the Elfin Wood Warbler, several species of amphibians, for the Puerto Rican Parrot, etc.

Arbimon Acoustics | Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/ARBIMON

Arbimon Acoustics is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with Arbimon Acoustics and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to share and.

Hi, Duncan

You can look at the following website:

https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com/products/song-meter-sm4?utm_source=sm4&utm_medium=MoreInfoButton&utm_campaign=HomePageJan2015

This is the SM4 Song Meter. Earlier I have used SM3 song meter to record bird calls.

The main pitfall is the background noise. You can also look at the huge bird call collections at Xenocanto or AVOCET.

https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com/products/song-meter-sm4?utm_source=sm4&utm_medium=MoreInfoButton&utm_campaign=HomePageJan2015

I have mainly worked on the sound identification of bats and a little on bush-cricket ID in the UK, but I have been working more recently on extending the current classifier that I have to a broader suite of species groups, including birds, with the aim of identifying as much as I can across the frequency range.

In terms of recording equipment for birds, there will be cheaper options than this, but I have been using acoustic recorders from Wildlife Acoustics, and colleagues working here at the BTO, have used the same kit to look at individual variation in Tree Pipit song. The recordings at least are really clean and of nice quality.  

In terms of software, it depends on what you want to do and the volume of data that you are likely to collect. Other colleagues here record nightly bird activity and can quickly look through a nights worth of recording before work using the free software audacity http://www.audacityteam.org/, but this is just looking for interesting flyovers. 

As others have suggested, depending on the volume of data, you could consider developing a classifier, which will allow you to automatically scan through and assign recordings to species. How well the classifier works, which depend on how distinctive acoustically the island species are, and that you take time to build in other sources of noise, whether this is biological or not. There are a lot of options for developing a classifier, all of which require building a reference library of known species recordings, but I imagine for an island fauna with a limited suite of species, this should be pretty straightforward, at least to significantly reduce the workload of manual checking of recordings.

For the classifier that I am working on myself, I am using the open source software Tadarida to developed by Yves Bas colleagues at the Museum of Paris to label known species recordings, and then an R script to build a Random Forest classifier, through which I can then put recordings containing unknown species.

http://openresearchsoftware.metajnl.com/article/10.5334/jors.154/

Best of luck, but feel free to drop me an email if it'd be helpful to follow up on anything.

Thanks James, Jafet, Subham and Stuart. Really useful.

Just been suggested this too... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309147111_Solo_an_open_source_customisable_and_inexpensive_audio_recorder_for_bioacoustic_research

Article Solo: an open source, customisable and inexpensive audio rec...

You might find these user-friendly guidelines a useful place to start. Technical Report Passive acoustic monitoring in ecology and conservation

Hi.

In the last two years I'm using a TASCAM DR-05 sound recorder to record bird songs and calls. If the birds are close to my position, this is a good equipment and I can obtain good recordings, but it can be better using a directional microphone. I improve the quality of my recordings using Audacity program, as many people, but there are other programs to do this.

I hope my comments can be useful...

Best regards.

Hi again.

Here there is a link to see information about the program Raven Lite (and to download it), used for analyses of bird sounds:

https://ravensoundsoftware.com/software/raven-lite/

Best regards.