Equipment: The photographic equipment consisted of a digital Canon D20 camera with an EF 200 F2.8L lens and a EF 300 F2.8L IS lens.

Night photography: So far, the only birds I photographed at night, were nightjars (Caprimulgidae). These birds often sit on dirt roads, and remain there when a car approaches. In such a situation, I used the headlights of the car, in addition to the camera flash, for illumination. Possibly, this resulted in unrealistic colours, in some instances.


Bird vocalizations were recorded with a Marantz PMD671 digital recorder and a Sennheiser ME67 or ME64 microphone. Sampling was set to 16 bit / 44.1 kHz, mono, with WAV file format.

The mp3 files available for download from this site were generated with lame version 3.97.

Most software used in this project is open source software, gratis and easily available. Digital picture processing was done with the gimp. Acoustic data were processed with the wavesurfer, a free sound editor from the Center for Speech Technology, Stockholm, Sweden; and with Raven Pro (the only comercial package used), by Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Spectrograms were generated with Raven Pro, using the following default DFT parameters:
DFT size 512, hop size 256, window type Hann, size equal to DFT size.
When different parameters were used, then this is mentioned in the figure legend.

The web pages were created and maintained on a linux system (OpenSuSE with KDE), directly in HTML, with standard unix tools (vim, bash scripts) and perl. I use a mysql database as a register of the bird species. Many thanks to the Open Software community for their excellent systems and programs.

My standard browser, for site development and testing, is firefox, and apart from this, I have only tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7.0. No testing was done with other browsers, mainly because of time constraints. If you find bugs, please notify me (contact).