Make Your Own Recordings of Bird Songs on Mini Disc and Digital Recorders

For the past few decades cassette tape recorders have ranked just below binoculars and spotting scopes on the list of birders' most indispensable tools. Their portability and ease of use has helped us learn bird songs at home or in the classroom, and immeasurably aided our enjoyment and appreciation of birds in the field.

More recently, the arrival of the compact disc (CD) format has brought us digital sound clarity, random track access, and even smaller players.

But both the cassette and CD have limitations. Cassettes often require seemingly endless fast forwarding and rewinding in order to arrive at the precise song or call desired, a process that could often begin only after flipping the tape to its other side.

CDs allow you to fairly fly to the exact spot that you want, whether the peent! of the American woodcock or the squint! of the Sprague's pipit, but it's difficult to record and customize your own CD.

Enter the mini disc. Looking like a tiny floppy disc from a computer and measuring a bit less than 3 inches square and about an 1/8 inch thick, the mini disc promises all the features that made cassettes and CDs great, plus a few nifty new capabilities, all with another huge leap downward in size and weight.

Let's say it's April, and you need to brush up on your warbler songs. You pull out a couple of CDs, a cassette or two, maybe even a vinyl album. Each of these has material you'd like to compare and cross-reference, but you'd have to be a veritable audiovisual octopus to switch back and forth between all these formats and machines. And forget about trying to haul all this stuff into the field with you.

But a little work with a mini disc recorder, and your problems will be neatly solved.

There are several problems with the bird song CDs. The Peterson series, for example, does not put the individual songs on single tracks, so it is impossible to put a song into a continuous loop mode for replay.

The National Geographic CDs have the songs on individual tracks, but every time the songs are looped for replay the name of the bird gets reannounced, as well. In order to avoid this, you have to copy the bird songs from your personal copy of a bird song CD to another medium. (Be sure to buy your own copy of the bird song CDs--they cost only a few dollars--so they can continue to be available at such a low cost.)

I have accomplished this task using two different media--a mini disc recorder and a digital recorder. My copy of Peterson's East/Central Bird Songs CD-ROM (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990) was copied to a Sony mini disc digital recorder (model MZ-R30) using a stereo speaker plug from the headphone output of the CD player to the line-input of the mini disc recorder. You could also use an optical connector if your CD player has this option. The mini disc system has the ability to assign 254 tracks to a single mini disc after it has been recorded. Because the Peterson CD has 267 songs on 33 tracks, some groups of birds will still have to be retained as single large tracks. (Note: Very few CD tracks are maintained in the copying process, and a few may even occur in the middle of a bird's song; all are easily edited.)

The next part is time consuming, but well worth the trouble. I assigned a track to each bird that breeds in my area of Georgia by inserting a track marker after the bird name was announced on the disc. I then labeled this track using the mini disc's built-in titling function (for example, track 37 was the eastern screech-owl “song,” and titled EASOWL). I recorded the track number of the eastern screech-owl on a mini disc label sheet as 37-EASO. Using the standard four-letter codes for birds, I easily marked all 81 of the breeding birds in my area on two labels attached to the mini disc cartridge holder.

At home or in the classroom the mini disc recorder is attached to a boombox with external inputs or to a stereo system. In order to use this system in the field, I purchased a Radio Shack 9 VDC, mini amplifier-speaker (No. 277-1008C). The Radio Shack portable telephone listener (No. 43-2318) works adequately, too. Although these speakers do not produce very high-quality sound (100 Hz to 10 kHz), they are adequate and highly portable, so I can easily carry them into the field to survey breeding birds.

There are a number of newer mini disc systems available that work as well as my older model, except the newer systems lack the exceedingly useful jog-dial. Mini disc systems are not cheap ($150 to $200), but their utility for working with bird songs is unrivaled.

I have also recorded my bird song CD to a Panasonic (RR-QR240) digital voice recorder with some success, except that this device, which has an internal speaker, has a limited recording range of about 500 Hz to 5 kHz. This means that higher frequency songs such as those of the cedar waxwing, blue-gray gnatcatcher, a number of the warblers, and a few sparrows produce rather poor recordings. The recordings for the other bird songs are quite usable, however, especially if played through the amplified external speaker. The songs must be recorded using the highest-quality recording option and microphone sensitivity. The Panasonic digital voice recorder works well because its Divide function allows for making new tracks for up to 400 (100 per folder) individual bird songs after one records the entire Peterson bird song CD to the digital voice recorder. Its jog-dial makes for easy location of the tracks and quick replays of individual tracks.

It is possible to produce similar results using an MP3 recording device, but the task is much more daunting because a computer and special track-making software are required to accomplish this feat. Similarly, it also is possible to do some of these tasks using CD-RW (read/write) systems, which cost about the same, but also require a computer to accomplish. Although one could carry a CD player into the field (plus speaker), the significantly smaller Sony mini disc and Panasonic digital recording systems can easily fit into a shirt pocket, and therefore are much easier to transport in the field.