I use a good shotgun microphone and a digital recorder. However, years ago i birded with randy Little in new jersey. Randy did all the original sound recordings for the Peterson field guides using a large parabolic dish microphone
On Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:54 PM Mary Keithler <mkeithler@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Nathan,--
Thanks for the timely recording tips and the heads up on the Merlin updates we can look forward to. Sounds very handy.
Mary
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 13, 2026, at 4:11 PM, Nathan Pieplow <npieplow@gmail.com> wrote:
--Hi everybody,
In recent days I've seen several examples of a classic Colorado birding problem: people try to record audio of a bird, but there's simply too much wind, and the recording ends up being unusable, or nearly so.
If you find yourself in this situation, I recommend that you start up Merlin and then put your phone in your pocket. The fabric then acts as a makeshift windscreen. It usually doesn't dramatically affect the levels from the bird sound, but it can greatly cut down on wind noise.
In a few weeks, we will all have the ability to send recordings from Merlin directly to eBird on our phones. This will also come with the ability to trim recordings in Merlin. If you do the phone-in-the-pocket trick, it will be important to trim away the not-in-pocket parts of the recording to ensure the best levels on the resulting online audio.
While I'm at it, I'll exhort everyone to please keep your recorder running longer than you might be tempted to. I've been asked to identify a bunch of ten-second and twenty-second recordings of Warbling Vireos recently, and it's not always possible. The longer your recordings, the better, especially for things like Warbling Vireos or any kind of rarity. Longer recordings are easier to ID and can be used in a wider variety of scientific research.
Thanks, and good birding!
Nathan PieplowBoulder
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