That type of information is critical to understanding migratory patterns and, ultimately, to forming conservation priorities.

My favorite datapoint from those recordings: nearly 1,000 redstarts that my mic picked up vs fewer than a dozen that others viewed in the region during the day ebird.org/tripreport/4...

Tangential, but having heard my FIL talk about his career in reinsurance, decisions by Swiss Re have become a personal go-to for, like, “future fact arbitration”. E.g., when there’s a question of how bad climate change will be for a region, I look at what insurers’ insurers are doing.

*learn what to look for

And the same goes for NFC recordings, especially as recording them gains popularity and newbies look what to look for. “Double-banded rising call with peak above 8 kHz” is much better than “Big night for this species otherwise rarely seen in daytime”, which is a habit I struggle to shake.

That habit helped me (and thus others) discover a summer tanager in a spot with an oft-reported scarlet tanager.

Comments like “continuing” or just “juvenile” or “common here in fall” or “heard” (as opposed to “repeatedly heard the standard ‘fitz-bew’”) aren’t great for confirmation.

Good to know! Bill Evans’ OldBird 21C has filled this niche for years but he recently decided not to assemble them himself anymore…he’ll just sell the components with instructions how to do it yourself. So any sensitive inexpensive outdoor-appropriate mic will be welcomed by relative novices

Sounds like this might address a grumble about clock “drift” a member of the NFC Discord recently made about AMs

@alex-rogers.bsky.social The mic isn’t quite sensitive enough for high-flyers like a lot of shorebirds, so they should keep that in mind if they’re choosing whether to get something more specialized. But it’s tough to beat your simplicity and reliability of the casing.

@alex-rogers.bsky.social Two mini scientific contributions from last week’s deployment: a mourning warbler (they “disappear” from the migration record between the south-central U.S. and Maritimes breeding grounds) and a hundred redstarts (in an area with no recent reports)

This grump from Mount Auburn Cemetery has been my desktop background for years.

And I'm being literal. The most popular NFC mic is Bill Evans' bucket-housed OldBird 21C (www.oldbird.org/mic/21c.htm). And here's my own bucket-on-a-stake that I noticed in my scope from across the harbor. It was responsible for 96 American redstart detections over just four nights this past week.

And heck, appreciation for the cistern: a 19th century solution for safely managing the flow of Mystic Lakes water through pipes to supply the residents of Charlestown.