Is anyone good at identifying nighttime migration bird calls in the Ohio area?

Nature Talk
1

I came to a large group of observations that needed ID by a birder I know in the Akron area (brianTinker). He sets up a microphone on his house to record flight calls during migration. These calls are different from what we may hear when the birds are perched/resting/foraging. So, I thought I would try to bring these to the attention of someone using the Forums.

I recently started focusing on audio identifications. I can bird by ear pretty well, so I thought I would give it a try. It turns out there are a lot of them out there needing ID. I sorted the observations to show the older ones first. I started with the newer ones, but I realized I wasn’t making much headway to get to the older ones because people kept adding them. Eventually I came to Brian’s observations. I am not qualified to try to ID them. But, I know there are a lot of birders who use iNaturalist. I hope someone can give them a try.

I should add that Brian did use a Nocturnal Flight Calls Facebook group to get an initial ID. He makes a note of that. But, you need two agreeing IDs here in iNaturalist.

2 Likes
2

The discord group for NFCs (Nocturnal Flight Calls) is good, people got tired of using Facebook. Here is an invite link, https://discord.gg/Rb5FPuNDWj

NFCs are super difficult for some species so I’d imagine getting consensus down to species might be challenging.

2 Likes
3

Might be something that you have already heard before, or it may not be relevant for your case, but Merlin Bird ID has worked pretty well for bird call IDs on my end. They have audio examples of what calls of the bird sound like, as well as being able to ID multiple birds in a single sample at once.

4

I will pass that along.

There is an Ohio Birding Discord server, as well. It was formed by people who really liked the Michigan Birding server. I joined myself. I like the clean format. It reminds me of the old listserv in some ways.