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Voice software helps study of rare Yosemite owls

Dunya News

In the bird world, they make endangered condors seem almost commonplace.

The unique Great Gray Owls of Yosemite, left to evolve after glacial ice separated them from their plentiful Canadian brethren 30 millennia ago, are both a mystery and concern to the scientists charged with protecting them.With fewer than 200 in existence in this small pocket of the Sierra Nevada, the slightest disturbances by humans can drive the extremely shy birds from their nests, disrupting sporadic mating cycles that ebb and flow annually depending upon food availability.So this summer, researchers found a way to abandon their traditional heavy-handed trapping, banding and the blasting of owl calls in favor of the kind of discrete, sophisticated technology used by spies and forensic scientists.They hope to lessen human influence on this subspecies of owls prized for the potential insights their survival offers into habitat-specific evolution.Even if it takes only 15 minutes to trap a bird, its traumatic for them in the long term, said Joe Medley, a PhD candidate in ecology at the University of California, Davis who perfected computer voice recognition software to track the largest of North Americas owls. With a population this small, we want to err on the side of caution in terms of the methods we use to get data.Medley placed 40 data-compression digital audio recorders around the mid-elevation meadows typically favored by the owl known as Strix nebulosa Yosemitensis, hoping to identify them by their mating, feeding and territorial calls.He ended up with 50 terabytes of owl calls mixed with airplanes flying overhead, frogs croaking, coyotes yipping, bears growling and even the occasional crunch of fangs on pricy microphones so much data it would have taken seven years to play back.