26
votes
Accepted
Is it cruel/unethical to playback bird sounds to birds in my yard?
Bird biologist here. The short answer is to think of playback as you would any other disturbance: it may not seem like a big deal if you're the only person doing it and you're only doing it briefly, ...
- 376
9
votes
Acoustic luring/playbacks for restoration/recolonization
Here is one example in the literature of experimental playbacks made on a coral reef, which was shown to increase fish colonization rates (in terms of settlement and retention). 6 week in-situ study. ...
- 3,715
8
votes
Acoustic luring/playbacks for restoration/recolonization
Here is an extensive review on the subject broken down by taxa (Buxton et al. 2020). If you dig through the sources, you will find varying techniques and strategies, both for implementation strategies ...
- 363
8
votes
Acoustic luring/playbacks for restoration/recolonization
I know that there are several examples where this has been done with seabirds, specifically Caspian terns. It has been used both to recolonize abandoned habitat, and to try and "move" a ...
- 3,567
7
votes
Is it cruel/unethical to playback bird sounds to birds in my yard?
I'm not a bird acoustician specifically (I do primates), but in general we try to avoid playbacks as much as necessary just so we're not messing up their behavior or stressing them out. But I think it ...
- 3,398
7
votes
Is it cruel/unethical to playback bird sounds to birds in my yard?
In my opinion, outside of a scientific context, lures of any kind should not be used - so no tapes either.
There are studies that show that birds (e.g. woodpeckers) sing more intensively for several ...
- 119
5
votes
Reliable lousdpeaker for low frequency noise playback?
The described phenomenon I would attribute to a loose connection or a cracked piezo-ceramic in the transducer. Check the capacitance of the transducer, clean and check all connectors. Go along the ...
- 588
5
votes
What amplitude do you use for playbacks?
It is not all all a beginner's question, on the contrary, in underwater behavioral response studies a lot of money was spent to realize that responses are context dependent.
So, answer to OP is that ...
- 7,630
4
votes
Acoustic luring/playbacks for restoration/recolonization
Anderson et al 2021 measured larval recruitment in degraded and healthy habitats in the Florida Keys. From the paper:
They used a Lubell Labs 9196H underwater loudspeaker connected to a waterproof ...
- 1,898
3
votes
Could conspecific playback stimuli improve detection rate and population estimates in acoustic monitoring?
If your objective is indeed population/density estimation, then, IMO, eliciting reponses violates the basic assumption that detections are not conditioned by the observation.
Edit: To address a ...
- 7,630
3
votes
Is it cruel/unethical to playback bird sounds to birds in my yard?
Hmm, underwater acoustician here too, and I don't know the answer to this in a hobbyist context, but I do know that the bird ringing community in the UK do this in a different context.
Background: The ...
- 3,715
3
votes
Permits for projecting sounds underwater?
I am not surprised that someone insists you need a permit, but in the face of all the much louder and totally unregulated echosounders on essentially all boats, it is a strange requirement I posit.
2
votes
Permits for projecting sounds underwater?
Yes, a funny and serious topic. For an experiment in a Swiss lake where we played test sounds including orca sounds, we had to get permissions and do lengthy risk assessments, including the question ...
- 588
1
vote
Could conspecific playback stimuli improve detection rate and population estimates in acoustic monitoring?
In general, I would advise against using playbacks to improve detection rate, though most of my research is in the marine realm, and focused on endangered species, so that perhaps colours my view on ...
- 1,108
1
vote
Help with playback experiment with .wav files/ generated signals, PAMGuard/Labview software
This seems to be a perfectly sensible way to use PAMGuard and we certainly use the same set up.
One thing to be careful of is that the output sample rate (in the sound output module settings) is still ...
- 2,091
1
vote
Help with playback experiment with .wav files/ generated signals, PAMGuard/Labview software
You have to carry out two tests:
is your transmitter working
is the POD working
Consequently, you should in addition to the POD record the transmitted signal with a standard hydrophone and compare ...
- 7,630
1
vote
What amplitude do you use for playbacks?
In playback experiments (any animals), it is crucial to monitor or estimate the sound level at the receiver's location, and not only at a random/standard distance to the speaker.
If you play back &...
- 4,161
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