LSA

An avid birder recently invited me to join him on a spring walk. His ability to rattle off" the names of the species flitting through the scrub was uncanny. "Because my vision is so poor," he told me, "I can barely see them, so I've trained myself instead to recognize them primarily by song." I was so impressed that when I got home, I turned to the Internet to learn more.

A quick search turned up a site dedicated to birdsong ID (virtualbirder. com/bbestu), compiled by Dick Walton, a naturalist and author of a birder's field guide. I found one of the most comprehensive collections of birdsong recordings at the Web site of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (www.birds.cornell.edu/programs/AllAbout Birds/BirdGuide). You can choose from a long list of species, from Acadian flycatchers to yellow-throated vireos. Song recordings are available for each bird, along with information about how to identify the bird in the wild.

Tony Phillips, a mathematician at Stony Brook University in New York, maintains a site highlighting the calls and songs of birds from New York State (math.sunysb.edu/~tony/birds). Click on the map of the world in the center of the page, enclosed by the hypertext "Links to other bird-song sites," to connect to sites with recordings of birds from around the globe.

Among the other features on Phillips's fascinating site is "Bird songs in musical notation." A link brings you to an informative introduction, followed by a list of six birds whose sounds are represented as sonograms and in musical notation; you can hear the notes played and the actual birdsong as well. For more about the topic, read about the New England naturalist F. Schuyler Mathews, who set down musical notation for the songs of birds in eastern North America in 1904 (www. npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1783 346.html).

Listening to recorded birdsong is only one of many ways on the Internet to tune in to real animal voices. If you miss this year's live performance of the seventeen-year cicada [see "The Natural Moment," by Erin Espelie, page 6], you can find a recorded version at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology's Periodical Cicada Page (insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/fauna/ michigan_cicadas/Periodical/Index.html).

As the weather heats up this summer, frog song may be as easy to hear as bird warbling. One useful site provides a long list of amphibian audio clips, plus an amusing inventory of some onomatopoeic names from around the world for the characteristic amphibian sound (allaboutfrogs.org/weird/general/ songs.html). (In Sweden, for instance, a frog goes "kvack.")

And for recordings from a veritable Noah's Ark of animals--from the American alligator to the zebra scaly cricket--you can scroll through a remarkably long list of links, compiled by an apparently anonymous nature lover (members.tripod.com/Thryomanes/ AnimalSounds.html).

Additional insect sounds can be found at an Iowa State University site (www.ent.iastate.edu/list/insect_sounds. html). Of particular interest there is a link to "Bug Bytes," where Richard W. Mankin, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, demonstrates how he and his colleagues are using sound to monitor insect pests (select "Digitized Sounds of Insect Movement, Feeding, and Communication," or go directly to cmave.usda. ufl.edu/~rmankin/soundlibrary.html).

ROBERT ANDERSON is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.

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