Each station used an Old Bird 21c (v2020) microphone to receive sound from the night sky. The audio signal was fed to the microphone input of a USB audio device connected to a Dell Latitude (7200 series) laptop to record the sound. Dick-r is software that was coded by Steve Mitchell for Old Bird Inc. in 1999 for use in the original LRGV transect. Nighthawk 0.3.0 is the most recent version of software that was first released in 2023 by Benjamin Van Doren. It involves an adaptation of the methodology used by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Merlin App toward automatically detecting avian nocturnal flight calls of 80+ species including the Dickcissel.

Harold Mills coordinated the dataflow processing infrastructure to feed tentative Dickcissel detections from Dick-r and Nighthawk 0.3.0 to a Vesper archive in the cloud. This began to come online in early May and allows users to browse spectrograms and listen to detected calls. It also facilitates evaluation of the accuracy of automatic species classification software. Click the link below to access the archive and follow the instructions below the link to navigate in the archive.

2024 Night Flight Call Archive

(archive info and navigation instructions)