Dan Mennill's Links Page
Note: This website is  old and hasn't been updated in a long time.

Bird Sound Resources

Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology -  The world's largest collection of recordings of animal sounds is digital, and much of the collection is available for listening online. Download Raven sound analysis software and you can visualize sounds from the library as spectrograms on your computer.

Xeno Canto - A very impressive user-maintained database focusing on sound recordings of diverse taxa, all available for listening online or for downloading.


Sound Analysis Software

SYRINX by John Burt - This is the software we use most extensively in the Mennill Lab. It is a very versatile software package for visualizing and measuring sounds. I use Syrinx to annotate sounds and conduct basic time and frequency measurements. Syrinx is also a very effective tool for interactive playback and automated sound recognition.

AviSoft SASLab - This is excellent commercial software for analyzing animal sounds. It is expensive but it is powerful. In the Mennill Lab, we use this software for automated sound measurements and spectrogram cross-correlations, among other things.

Raven - Raven is Cornell University's Bioacoustics Research Program's sound analysis software. There is a free version called Raven Lite, and a full version called Raven Pro which is available for purchase. 

X-BAT - The eXtensible BioAcoustic Tool from Cornell's Bioacoustics Research Program is free open source software that can be run within MATLAB; it is very powerful for advanced sound analyses.

Adobe Audition - A second important software tool in the Mennill Lab. This software was designed for manipulating music, but it proves useful for visualizing animal sounds.  In particular, Audition is very effective for frequency analysis, representing sounds as spectrograms, and spot filtering.  We use version 2.0, but there is a newer version 3.0 now available.


Radio Telemetry

Please see my radiotelemetry page for advice on how to radiotag small birds.

Holohil Systems Limited -  A dealer of radio transmitters in Ontario Canada. I have used Holohil's LB-50 radio transmitters to follow Black-capped Chickadees.


Costa Rica and Santa Rosa National Park

The homepage for the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, an outstanding national park where I conduct much of my tropical research. Santa Rosa National Park is contained within the ACG.

Investigarodes ACG - A website for scientific researchers working in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste .


Recording Devices and Playback Devices

Wildlife Acoustics - We use Wildlife Acoustics Song Meters extensively in the Mennill Lab.  They are an excellent product for automated recording, and the people at Wildlife Acoustics are really helpful.

FoxPro Speakers - I am not a hunter, but I recommend Fox Pro's "Digital Calls" (these are field-portable loudspeakers that include built-in memory to store your sounds and a remote control that you can use to operate the loudspeaker remotely).