Hey! So, we're here with Ernesto Ruelas, who is an ornithologist with the Action Center.
What are we going to be doing today?
- What we're going to do is follow Trail #4.
We're going to be looking for birds.
So the way we do this work is that we follow the pre-opened trail
that Alvaro has worked on for several weeks.
And we look for birds.
We do this at a slow pace so we can detect as many as we can.
- What should we keep in mind while we're doing this? Like, be quiet?
- This is the most complex bird landscape
that you can find in the world,
so that takes a lot of work. First is to be aware that most of the birds
that we'll be recording, we won't see. 80% of the birds we only listen to.
I have 7 x 42 binoculars that have great light. They are really good for working in the forest.
I have a field guide to the birds of Peru, my notebook to take notes,
an iPod with headphones, a tape recorder.
This is one model that a lot of the bird people really like.
A unidirectional microphone with a handle.
I do a lot of recordings primarily for learning, and then I go back to my
reference collection to figure out what I'm hearing.
- Oh, that's great. Cool! I hope we find some birds.
- We have a piha there.
(whistles) - Yeah, the one that makes a lot of noise? The woo-hoo!
- Yeah. "Wis-wincho" they call them in Spanish.
- Yeah. - Wis-winchoo! - What does that translate to?
- Nothing. It doesn't mean anything. - It's nonsense?
- It's just a call, yeah. - It's the most indicative rainforest bird noise.
- Yeah. Right here, it is. We have an antbird back there.
- Does it just take practice to differentiate between the insect noises and the bird noises?
- You are misled all the time. Telling insects from birds seems like a dumb thing,
but it happens often that you can't figure out what it is. - Yeah.
- And also mammals. - Really? - Yes, yes. Some of them have birdlike calls.
- Really?
- That's cool. Oh, that guy's got a piece of toilet paper from camp.
Do you know what kind? - They call it "tio juan," Uncle Juan.
Tio juan, juan, juan. Where is it? White-throated toucan.
- Wow. How beautiful. So what do you do with all of this new information?
If you're seeing different species crossing-- you're hearing them in different forests...
Does this immediately go into the new field guide, or do you publish a new paper
about distribution? - I think the speed of change and the fact that many of the places
in the Western Amazon haven't been explored that deeply makes you run
into these range extensions very often. - Yeah. - And it's not that you're discovering
the greatest thing, it's just that the place has been overlooked in time. - Yeah.
- We can upload them in systems online, like eBird, where you can map your records
in different places, and whenever the next edition of the Field Guide to the Birds of Peru
comes out, then the maps will be redrawn.
So I have a flycatcher and I have an antbird, and I was trying to focus on the
antbird because the flycatcher I have recorded many times. It's somewhat common.
- Mmhm. - I think I got a pretty bad recording of both.
- You can have longer microphones that are narrower, that narrow down the angle of
what you're recording, and that helps a lot. But for the most part, you can't really do much
if there is competing voices in the same spot. When you have a flock of antbirds following
a swarm of army ants... - Yeah. - You hear multiple voices and there is a lot of excitement.
It's very difficult to get a recording of a single species, unless it's
the only one following the ants, which is really rare.
- Well, we've been out for a little over an hour. I am incredibly sweaty.
What's the conclusion? What did we see? - Today on this walk, about an hour and
fifteen minutes, we probably heard 20-25 species. - Really? - And we saw two.
- Yeah. I saw one dove fly over really quickly, and you saw a toucan.
- I saw a toucan. - So what I've learned about birdwatching is it's more about
the other things that you see while you are trying to listen for birds. - Right.
- They should call it "bird listening" not birdwatching. - In this case, yes.
You're totally right. - (laughs) Cool.