MURA AGM & "Listening to Nature - All Day and All Night - in McMaster Forest" Presentation 2022

Special Presentation to the AGM:   “Listening to Nature - All Day and All Night - in McMaster Forest”

The guest speaker, Dr. Doug Welch, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Vice-Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, talked about a Hamilton Naturalists’ Club research project he was involved with. While Doug is an observational astronomer, another side of his attention has concentrated on bioacoustic monitoring of birds (and other species) in the McMaster Forest. He shared his experiences with long-time recording in locations around southern Ontario with the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy. The audio recordings are transformed into "sonograms" (also known as "audiospectrograms" in which bird vocalizations can be visualized. The "images" are then passed through a freely-available machine-learning program called BirdNet to produce a list of detections of different species. Such constant monitoring can help reveal the arrival times of migrating birds from year to year in a systematic way.

Dr. Welch presented a number of spectrograms of species - and played the corresponding recordings - to reveal the rich lode of information present in such monitoring. Finally, he discussed how anybody with a modern smartphone can capture sonograms and identify them.