What are your opinions on using specific sounds, audios, or music to attract animals? Personally I don’t think its a good idea considering it can attract other animals that aren’t harmless. edit: and scare away other wildlife
I wouldnt be in support for this but ill be contradicting myself as I love moth lights
thats interesting 
, cuz like technically moth lights are the visual versions of attracting using sounds
Hi Melanie,
Using sounds to attract animals is generally frowned upon. There are a lot of birding resources that you can find, that go into more detail about the why.
On the other hand, we will protect what we love. Feeding birds, moth lighting, and lots of other ways of attracting animals deepen engagement with nature. Ecological literacy has never been lower, and the more people engage with nature, the more they do to protect it. So we can’t just make a blanket statement like “all use of sound is bad”.
It’s nuanced! Each of us has to make that call for ourselves.
absolutely!
always think about how it would affect the creature, if your personal gain matters more than the organism then im not sure if you’re on the right path
Almost all birdwatchers in my country do this, they play bird calls to get a better shot. I’m very interested to know your opinion. I know it’s an ethically controversial issue. I’m not asking about the global context, but rather about your personal experience and what you have personally encountered.
Is it considered the norm or an exception?
A person can get into trouble doing this in US refuges. As it has been explained to me by a wildlife officer that using the sound alters the normal course of an animal or bird’s day which is against the rules. I’ve seen many people get away with it, but get an officer with zero tolerance and it could be ticket time. Hopefully those who have a passion for wildlife would choose to not do it out if respect for nature.
I’m what you might call a seasonal birder. If it’s warm enough for good bug activity, back to macro-land!
That said, i personally don’t use recorded sounds or try to imitate calls of birds. Or, as I’ve even seen, seed baits.
There’s a video circulating I saw the other day where someone positioned a bunch of large thrift store old aquariums stocked with small fish from a bait shop – with trimmed off tail membranes to keep them from moving! – and placed the tanks in an arc around a reported kingfisher nest site. Did he get the dive shot? Yep. Didn’t take long at all. But risky?
Considering the bird’s diving speed, the possibility of a serious injury, I would certainly agree with most that it was irresponsible and very selflishly reckless.
But that’s a very extreme example. Are recorded sound ‘baits’ less threatening? Well, technically, sure. But it comes down to principles. And the potential thin-edging it does to one’s ability to maintain integrity.
Personally, I don’t agree with the bird calliing practice (except by professional researchers and conservation teams), but I also have a lot more concerns about birder-swarming of nesting sites in general.
I have stumbled on these a few times myself – both owl nests, and it did not feel right ro me at all.
Myself, I lifted my ‘tiny’ (relatively speaking) Nikon P950 and took maybe a minute to pull off a few shots, while I stood at the edge of enough massive camera/tripod combos to fill a bus (or purchase several buses!), owned by rather seriously-determined shooters with coolers and such, that had been parked there for hours. Nope. Not helpful for nesting, and stressed out birds.
In terms of bugs, I have thought of using light and/or moth traps because – wow, what a performance boost for the ol’ lifer-list, wot? But, no, that feels like cheating and potentially harmful for too many that might be struggling for species survival.
I don’t even go for rock or log rolling. Exception being a fresh fall of a dead tree. I will carefully snoop around grounded limbs, or search exposed rootballs as a natural opportunity. As I lived right next to an elevated escarpment (Niagara) I would also examine sites of boulder falls from above.
There was an unexpected positive aspect of NOT relying on performance-enhancing gear to find more species: I got MUCH better at finding rare stuff without it! As the top observer in apecies count in my former region after only 3 years in iNat, I had by far the lowest observation count of rhe top ten in terms of total species as a percentage of total observations. It just forces you to look harder and become more efficient and prepared for the qyick capture. True with birds and bugs and even plants, fungi and more (the skills are highly transferable).
Perhaps the one behavior I worry about more than any other, is the number of dog owners who disobey the leash requirement and feces pickup rules on the trails (and tying the bags to branches or hiding them in tree hollows is NOT the idea at all!).
This has been studied and found to be one of the most wildlife stress-inducing factors on publicly accessible park trails.
But it’s like trying to convince a parent that they should teach their kid to be careful and stay on the trail.
With such strong emotional investments like children or dogs, it almost never results in anything but a defiant and angry response around ‘rights and freedoms’.
(Sigh) We have a lot of work to do when it comes to elevating public understanding. But hey, smoking, and drunk driving and other public awarenes campaigns have actually worked!
We need to study how those campaigns worked very closely and develop effective behaviour-changing ideas to help do the same for wildlife protection if we want to seriously reduce all the environmentally detrimental human stuff we see building up in publically accessible wild areas.
My personal opinion is… don’t do it. Some time ago I worked with a team of ornithologists doing scientific surveys of bird populations. For certain difficult to spot species, they did use the callback method, but following very strict standardised protocols designed to minimise disturbance and stress. Amongst professional naturalists (at least in the country I operate in, namely Italy) it is widely accepted that use of callbacks is associated with significant risks to the species concerned, and possibly others as well. You need to consider that if an animal responds to a recording of its call, it doesn’t do so just to say “hi nice to meet you”, it usually does so because this is its way of announcing and defending its territorial space, so you’re exposing it to undue stress and obliging it to waste valuable resources defending its territory from a threat which doesn’t actually exist. This can also distract its attention from normal activities such as feeding, mating, looking after its young… and in some sensitive cases, this may be critical.
Depending on the species involved, transmitting a recorded call could also either attract predators, or give prey species the false idea that there are predators around, so once again disrupting their normal activities and causing them unnecessary stress.
There’s a lot that could be said (both good and bad) about foraging, moth lighting and similar “modes of engagement” between humans and their fellow creatures, but that would only muddy the waters of this particular thread 
.