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Pinpointing a Bird in a Forest by Ear
Without vision, locating birds to record their songs
© Omar E. Ortiz
Juan Pablo Culasso is a nature recordist based in Colombia. Here, he describes how he uses a parabolic microphone to record a singing bird. Juan Pablo is blind, so he uses his hearing to pinpoint a small bird in dense vegetation.
BirdNote®
Pinpointing a Bird in a Forest by Ear
Written by Conor Gearin
This is BirdNote.
Juan Pablo Culasso is a nature recordist based in Colombia. Here, he describes how he uses a parabolic microphone to record a singing bird. Juan Pablo is blind, so he uses his hearing to pinpoint a small bird in dense vegetation.
[Rainforest soundscape]
Juan Pablo Culasso: I walk in without my headphones. I try to locate the sound with my ears. When I located that, I ask for my guide. The first question is, is it really 100% dense? Or there is a way to pass this row of trees to get closer to the source of the sound? And then they say, yeah, you can walk three steps to the right, and you can go inside and get a different perspective.
[Faint song from a Masked Gnatcatcher emerges from soundscape background]
Juan Pablo Culasso: And then I put my headphones. When you use a parabola, you need to focus the sound.
[Masked Gnatcatcher song gradually gets louder, panning from side to side as the parabola focuses]
Juan Pablo Culasso: And when the sound is focused, the volume of the sound really increase in the headphones, and you can get really sure that that sound is really 100% focused, and you can record that.
[Masked Gnatcatcher song gets louder]
Juan Pablo Culasso: In some situations, you need to target the parabola to the branch instead of the bird, because the sound is bouncing on that branch and is focused better than if you are going to target the bird.
[Masked Gnatcatcher song]
Hear some of Juan Pablo’s recordings on our website, BirdNote dot org. I’m Michael Stein.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Great Horned Owl ML227530 and Masked Gnatcatcher ML227532 recorded by Juan Pablo Culasso.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2023 BirdNote December 2023
Narrator: Michael Stein
ID# culassoj-02-2023-12-28 culassoj-02
Conor Gearin
Writer