Wildlife Acoustics Announces its Song Meter™ SM2 Night Flight Call Package for Monitoring Migratory Birds

Cost effective and weatherproof package sets a new standard for acoustically monitoring birds in flight

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Aug 02, 2010, 08:00 ET

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting -- Wildlife Acoustics, the leading supplier of acoustic monitoring systems for endangered and threatened wildlife species around the world, today announced the availability of the new Song Meter SM2 Night Flight Call Package.

Based on the powerful SM2 Recorder Platform, the SM2 NFC Package includes the new SMX-NFC weatherproof microphone designed especially for recording distant night flight calls in the sky while attenuating sounds from the ground such as insects and amphibians. This new microphone combined with the proven ruggedness of the SM2 recorder creates a robust field instrument suitable for even the harshest environments. The SM2 recorder combines extremely low power consumption, high capacity, and sophisticated scheduling for long-term unattended acoustic monitoring.

"Since direct observation of the billions of birds that annually migrate at night is largely impossible, monitoring migrants by sound is critically important for developing and implementing conservation plans for the 21st century," said Ken Rosenberg, Director of Conservation Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "Recording flight calls of nocturnally migrating birds provides an excellent (and currently the only) opportunity for reliably and economically studying species composition and abundance on a broad geographic scale, particularly for rare and elusive species for which diurnal surveys may not suffice."

"The Gulf oil spill is a sobering reminder of the fragility of our ecosystems," said Ian Agranat, President and CEO of Wildlife Acoustics. "We are proud to deliver the first ever commercially available microphone specifically designed to record the calls of migrating birds to better measure the impacts of climate change and habitat loss on a broad range of species."

The SMX-NFC has a microphone capsule mounted near the surface of a flat horizontal plate creating a pressure zone for sounds originating from above the plate. The design delivers a relatively flat frequency response from 2 to 12kHz with 3 - 6dB of signal gain within a beam angle of 125 degrees, while attenuating sounds below the plate. This allows up to a 10dB signal-to-noise improvement over a non-directional microphone. The microphone is fully weather resistant and includes a 10m cable and a mounting bracket to allow a wide range of mounting options.

"We are excited to see the nocturnal flight call package offering, and even more thrilled now that we've started using the system," said Rosenberg. "This design fills a major unfilled niche in producing an off-the-shelf, cost-effective, portable, and waterproof recording system to study and monitor flight calls. We feel this product will be an invaluable tool, providing an easy to deploy, standardized, and quality controlled solution for monitoring nocturnal bird migration acoustically."

The package is available now for US$799 including the SM2 recorder platform and the SMX-NFC microphone.

About Wildlife Acoustics, Inc.

A wildly innovative company:

Wildlife Acoustics, Inc., a privately held Massachusetts corporation, is the leading provider of bio-acoustic monitoring technology for scientists, researchers, and government agencies worldwide since 2003.

www.wildlifeacoustics.com

SOURCE Wildlife Acoustics, Inc.