Martin Minarik

That sounds great, thanks! Will have a look!

Bike twitching should be the only acceptable form of twitching! 😂 Lovely bird!

Thanks! Might give it a go then, but at this stage I still prefer improving my ID skills by manually raking through all the recordings 😃 Will need those later to be able to assess which classifier works best for me anyway, and how reliable they are 🤷🏻‍♂️

Thanks! No, slowly working through it, the old-fashioned way. Tried BTO Acoustic Pipeline, but seemed to be missing quite a lot of the faint calls, and misidentifying some loud ones (Wigeon/Oystercatcher being repeatedly suggested for what was a resident Little Owl). May give it another go, though.

Don't get too excited about the landfowl NFCs. The first one is a Quail, yay! But the other two are just Pheasants. Nocturnal migration? No. Nocturnal flight call? Yes, if a few meters worth of escape flight after being flushed by a fox, or something, counts :)

Maybe just for better readability, here's the same data split by major bird taxa.

Waders are more evenly distributed throughout the year. This will a nice one to plot by species at some later point. Same with rallids, in fact. Anyway, back to IDing now, I guess 😂

Overwhelming majority of the autumnal songbird flight calls are Redwing. They clearly cluster into nights with lots of movement. The concentration of rallid calls (Moorhen, Coot, Water Rail) into spring months is also nice 😊

Avoiding the important steps in processing my #nocmig data (IDing a vast backlog of nocturnal flight calls from 2020-2023, and organising data from 2023 onwards), I tried to plot a subset of the calls I had already processed. A nice glimpse of what's to follow though 😊

Interesting! I would have thought they'd rely on electroreception from early on, considering their head is already practically covered with ampullae of Lorenzini at the onset of feeding (doi.org/10.7554/eLif...).

Opposing roles for Bmp signalling during the development of electrosensory lateral line organs In sturgeon, fewer electrosensory organs form after targeting Bmp5 for CRISPR/Cas9-mediated mutagenesis, whereas more form after chemically blocking all Bmp signalling shortly before their primordia e...

Another bit of insight into electroreceptor development in sturgeons by the Baker lab, the full version of Alex Campbell's paper is now available on eLife.

elifesciences.org/articles/99798

Meanwhile, Redwing counts indicate these winter thrushes are already leaving East Anglia for Scandinavia, while Moorhens and Coots will be ramping up their territorial flights with the coming spring. Good to hear a Barn Owl above our village too, along with the usual Tawny.

Here's a screenshot of a spectrogram of the Stone-curlew as shown in Audacity.

Recorded some migrating bird calls near Cambridge on Saturday night, and what a lovely surprise to hear a Stone-curlew amongst them! Same day RSPB posted a #SpringArrivalSpotlight about this rare bird on Bluesky 🙂 What a timing!

After you posted this, a Stone-curlew flew over our Cambridge garden the following night 😊

Common Frogs going at it during the sunny spell this weekend. Video sped up 5x, sound is in original speed to appreciate the impressive chorus of croaks. #frogspawn

Common Frogs taking the most of the UK's lovely spring weather this weekend.

Being used to Nothern Pintails staying so far out on open water that they usually occupy just a few dozen pixels on my desperate photo attempts, this one was quite a nice surprise on our brief stopover on Dernford reservoir near Stapleford, Cambs today 😊

Celebrating the #WorldWetlandsDay with a visit to WWT Welney today 😊

"at a distance of 100 cm in Cambridge tap water, signals of approximately 30 μV were observed."

🔌🐟 Time to pour myself a glass of the stuff, and gulp proudly on the medium in which the electric field of Gymnarchus was first characterised by H. W. Lissmann in 1951 😊

www.nature.com/articles/167...

Happy 2025 everyone! The attached New Year's card features some of my wildlife encounters from last year. My favourite amongst them is a lizard, Algerian Psammodromus, unusual amongst European species by its ability to produce audible distress calls 📣🦎 Also stunning to look at.

It's #GarWeek, apparently, so here's my contribution 😊 A short timelapse of Tropical Gar (Atractosteus tropicus) embryo development, as shot on a cheap digital microscope in Mexico 🇲🇽 during the final gar trip of my PhD.

Sox2 antibody staining in Sterlet sturgeon larvae on the left, showing mostly sensory organs, including the mechanosensory lateral line. Alpha-Tubulin antibody on the right, showing amongst others the nerves that innervate the lateral line hair cells above and below eyes.

I started using enzymatic metallography back in 2015 when studying head development in fish embryos in Brian Metscher's MicroCT lab in Vienna. The crisp black signal caused by silver precipitation by a HRP-conjugated antibody is almost as beautiful under a stereoscope as it is stunning under X-rays.