The Cacophony bird monitors work by recording periodically throughout the day, averaging 35 x 60 sec recordings in a 24-hour period.
The recordings are very useful for measuring the amount of bird song and how these change in frequency and volume over time. This will give LHS a really good baseline value to measure the impact of their predator control and reforestation efforts.
The songs the monitors pick up are translated into graphs the on the Cacophony Index System. These show how useful the recordings are, so those with higher values (higher = green) mean that there’s a strong indication of volume on the recording.
The songs the monitors pick up are translated into graphs the on the Cacophony Index System. These show how useful the recordings are, so those with higher values (higher = green) mean that there’s a strong indication of volume on the recording.
The Cacophony Index was named after Captain Cook’s first impression of New Zealand, when he described a “cacophony of birdsong” (somewhat ironically, perhaps). This technology provides a real-time measurement of bird populations through their sounds, and feeds data directly back to the station. If Lake Hāwea Station is successful at reducing the predators then the bird life will increase and so will the Mokomoko population.
There is no mobile reception in the remote part of the station where the monitors were installed, so they were set-up with a solar panel and a memory card. The latter will need to be retrieved from time to time to download the recordings to the Cacophony servers. Two additional bird monitors were installed at the homestead (with power and Wi-Fi) and in Timaru Creek (solar and mobile data) where native re-planting is happening.
