FILE PHOTO - Robin photographed by Lyn MacDonald.
Image Credit: Lyn MacDonald
May 08, 2022 - 3:32 PM
A Keremeos heritage farm is keeping track of birds that are visiting its site using a fancy audio recording device.
Chris Mathieson, general manager for the Grist Mill and Gardens Historic Site, said the team has started recording bird song and hopes to install a live audio feed to track the birds in real time for visitors.
At the beginning of 2020, with the pandemic, they realized there might not be any visitors to the site so they began thinking of virtual ways to connect with an audience.
This box analyses more than 6,000 bird songs to determine the birds on site.
Image Credit: Chris Mathieson
“We had really good WiFi installed over the entire heritage site and while we used that for live videos and things, that was really cool, we realized we could use it for other projects, like citizen science work,” Mathieson said.
They installed their own weather station and for the last month, a small computer and audio device has been tracking birds.
The box uses artificial intelligence to determine what bird song is being heard, he said. It analyses more than 6,000 common bird songs in order to determine the songs being sung on site.
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“We have a lot of people who visit the site who are interested in birds and I actually found a related app on my phone that got be digging (into the project),” he said.
In March, mostly robins were recorded but Eurasian collared doves, California quail and northern flickers were other popular birds that visited the site. Cedar waxwings also decided to nestle in a tree where the recorder was placed, so for a week and a half all the recordings were of the waxwings, he said.
Birds recorded for March, 2022.
Image Credit: Chris Mathieson
“The big future goal is adding a second microphone that’s ultrasonic because we might be able to use it to identify bats too so that way we might be able to find out what’s flying around at night,” Mathieson said.
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