Ever wanted to chat with a bird of prey? Volunteers taking part in a conservation project will soon exchange 鈥渉oots鈥� with owls via mobile phone.
For the last four years biologists at Maine Audubon wildlife centre in Falmouth have been enlisting volunteers to go into local woods at night and play recorded owl hoots. This prompts nearby owls to respond, helping the researchers estimate which owls live where, and monitor how populations vary between areas and over time. However, there is no way to check whether the same owl responses are being counted multiple times, which could skew population estimates.
So from next month, volunteers will instead call the owls using 64 phones connected to loudspeakers and microphones spread throughout the woods. The set-up, created by Dale Joachim and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, allows volunteers to monitor multiple locations simultaneously, and should help biologists work out when two microphones are detecting the same owl. It will also allow volunteers to gather data from their homes, ensuring the presence of people does not impact the owls鈥� behaviour.
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To call the birds, volunteers log into a website, select the appropriate hoot and send it to one or more phones, which then play the sound over a speaker. An array of microphones then picks up the responses and transmits them back to the website, where volunteers note which hoots were detected where. See for full details.
