I stuck my mic out the window again this morning and fed the recordings to the Merlin app, which picked up the usual suspects and at least one more Waxwing flying over the house.
@sciencebase Come a long way from my Pifco cassette recorder left on the garage roof all day.
@sciencebase I used to play back the tapes and I had an actual LP of bird song to compared it with.
@SteelFolk Montage of screenshots from this morning's recordings...I could hear some of them as they called in the garden, but didn't hear the Redwing nor the Waxwing nor the Kestrel flying over until I listened on the "tapes"
@SteelFolk Pifco! I do remember than brand!
@sciencebase It ate batteries. Four of those big cylinder ones per recording session (day at school). It had a "condenser mic" built in, whatever one of those is.
@SteelFolk Condenser is the old word for capacitor
@sciencebase This thing was a stamp-size grill in the plastic case with a mic under it. It used it unless you plugged in one to pretend you were Robert Plant.
@SteelFolk Yes, I had a plugin mic on one of my later cassette players
@SteelFolk I've given you a mention in my blog post about audio birding. It would be interesting to hear those tapes...wonder if the number of birds and their diversity are very different from what you'd get doing the same these days...
@sciencebase One feature of leaving it out all day was that the wee darlings shat on it.
@SteelFolk I take it you just had C60 or C90 cassettes though?
@sciencebase I had C120 ones sometimes. Had to leave it out all day regardless.
@sciencebase Luckily it was 1976. Ladybower empty - I walked on the bottom amid the drowned village remains.
@SteelFolk Hah, yes...
@SteelFolk to be honest, not much further...this is still just a microphone poking out my office window and recording on to a hard drive rather than a cassette. The Merlin bit, I suppose is the big news...I can barely hear some of the calls/songs it picks up unless I EQ them and crank them up to 11