This breeding season, the IBA Program deployed several 'Automated Recording Units' to inventory forest birds at the Bent of the River. An automated recording unit, or ARU, is small computer housed in a weatherproof box that records sound on a daily schedule. The recordings can then be run through a software program, which if carefully calibrated can automatically pick out the bird songs and potentially identify which species delivered them. Our units (made by Wildlife Acoustics) are particularly flexible - we can remotely monitor just about any animal that makes characteristic sounds, as well as the environmental variables that affect the sound-making patterns of animals - e.g. temperature and humidity. This company also makes ultrasonic (for bats) and underwater models.

Once we work out the kinks, these could be deployed on much larger geographic and temporal scales, which would eliminate (or at least reduce) the need to send field assistants out to repeatedly survey remote areas of the state, freeing them up to collect data elsewhere and making it more likely that we'll detect the rarer species. The data from this effort would be used to investigate which landscape and habitat characteristics are driving the statewide distributions of high conservation priority species. We hope to work with the University of Connecticut to get a large-scale program like this off the ground sometime in the next 1-2 years.

The ARUs at the Bent of the River were retrieved from the field in mid-July and the data are being downloaded to a hard drive. We still have several months of analysis to do before we'll have any results to share, but in the mean time as an example of what the ARU recordings look like when we display them visually, here is a recording of four different Hooded Warbler song types.

Click here for another example of ARUs