Paul,
This young nerds enthusiasm was contagious. His excitement was off the charts. We listened to his recordings, and what I could hear over the ringing in my ears, sounded too close to call. He then took us outside and tried to get us to hear some for ourselves, but the nearby expressway noise drowned it all out.
Check out
www.oldbird.org
You can go to this government weather site and watch the radar just as the sun is setting or as a cold front, or storm is tracking across the map, and see these blue plumes erupt which are large numbers of migratory birds taking to the air for a night flight.
The birds use the tail winds from the storms to speed up their flight.
The funny part was watching all us older birders standing just outside the nature center, in the dark, trying our damnedest to hear something in the night sky other than the cicada or a passing semi.
The young man grew up birding with his father and he would probably rank as a super birder and just wants to push it to the next level. They started out by soldering their own circuits for these receivers and now you can buy a kit. Cornell has a library of bird songs that actually will show you the wave length. The listening that this fella has done has improved his ability to hear birds during the day when he's out doing normal birding.
It is kind of like what we mentioned here before about citizens, in the field, suppling information for entomology and ornithology as well...Who know what they might dig up.
Cornell calls it "Citizen Science". Each year they have all the members of the lab do a thing called "Feeder Watch" and another deal where you report your sightings for so many days in a row...Everyone's logging on and reporting and they use the info for migratory info.