Saturday, April 14, 2007

A whole lot of distant toots and taps

Take a look at table 4 (page 17) of CLO's '05-'06 search report here (PDF).

In just over 9,000 hours of ARU recordings, their preliminary report shows over 400,000 automated detections of potential IBWO sounds (over 240,000 potential vocalizations and over 160,000 double knocks).

That's an average of over 40 potential detections per hour!

Numbers like that help explain why you shouldn't get carried away if you hear some potential IBWO sounds anywhere in the woods (even if you're in an alleged "hot zone" and even if you've also glimpsed an intriguing bird within the hour).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The 240,000 potential vocalization detections speak only to how crude the first cut was, they ended up with only twelve detections that they thought were actually of any interest, and they’ve chosen not to share those with us. It’s easy to imagine why.

The quantity of detections in the Mennill audio though isn’t nearly as interesting as its distribution. Example:

I’ve said before why I’m persuaded that Mennill analyzed 24 hours a day… but suppose he didn’t…there are still no toots in the hour after dawn and the hour before sunset (although there are several double knocks even before sunrise). What’s the probability of these post-dawn and pre-sunset dead zones occurring if the toots are wind produced and equally likely to occur during any hour of the day? If the average recording day was 12 hours long, the likelihood of all 210 recordings landing within the ten middle hours of the recording period would less than one-in-ten to the fifteenth power.

Mennill's toots are not random forest happenings.

pd

Anonymous said...

Ivory-bill, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster; searchers for all three sift through piles of "evidence" looking for the unexplained that they can attribute to their favorite non-existent creature.

Anonymous said...

Mennill's toots are not random forest happenings.

So freaking what? There are non-random toots, squeals, chucks, knocks, gun shots, etc... all over Tucson and I don't go around saying there is a family of Eared Quetzals in my yard.

Anonymous said...

"...I don't go around saying there is a family of Eared Quetzals in my yard."

Good thing, too. Those are more likely made by Imperial Woodpeckers!

My Two Cents

Anonymous said...

Yes Pd, I sense you are winding down. This is the poorest arguing that you have ever done.

What's up? Is it hard to continue to defend the indefensible? Well, wecome to the club. Welcome back to the Skeptics.