Equipment: The photographic equipment consisted of a digital Canon D20 camera with an EF 200 F2.8L 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 shotgun microphone. Sampling was set to 16 bit / 44.1 kHz, mono, with WAV file format.

A shotgun microphone is most sensitive to the front, while off-axis signals are attenuated. However, the degree of attenuation depends on the frequency of the off-axis sound. In the case of the ME67, for example, a 1 kHz signal from an angle of 60 degree is attenuated 5 dB, while a 4 kHz signal from the same direction is attenuated more than 15 db, and a 8 kHz signal is attenuated about 23 dB (see polar diagram on Sennheiser website). In other words, if the shotgun microphone is not pointed directly in the bird's direction, then the recorded sound could have a distorted frequency spectrum. This might be the case with some of the recordings presented here, especially with background sounds.

The mp3 files available for download from this site were generated with lame version 3.97 (linux command: lame -m m myfile.wav myfile.mp3).

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.

The web pages were created and maintained on a linux system (SUSE 9.2 and 10.0, with KDE), directly in HTML, with standard unix tools (vi, bash scripts) and perl. I use a mysql database as a register of the bird species. Many thanks to the free 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 drop me a line (contact).