Ciblek Mania

Congratulations to Robert Mortensen for this two-part doozy. Robert blogs here.

Some other chuckle-makers:

2stampis2b said...Dost thou need a breeze, M'Lord?

Anonymous said...Honestly the ad said it was guarenteed to grow hair using veiled solar rays in just 6-12 hours!

cyberthrush said...Now you can focus the sun's rays to get that quick long-lasting tan you always want in minutes, with the new portable 'Jimdandy Tanner' from Ronco. (...and if you order in the next 15 minutes, we'll throw in a pocket fisherman for free!)

Su said:....."I knight thee Sir Birdsalot"

In this photo, Lisa White, amazing bird-book editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company in Boston is holding a giant light reflector over me while Jeffrey A. Gordon (standing out of the frame) videotapes an interview with me. This was for the Peterson Field Guide podcast series, and was meant to be a part of an interview with the podcast producers (Jeff, me, and our project manager, Lisa). But we all hated so much how we looked and sounded on camera, that we scrapped the idea. Special thanks to Phoebe Thompson for taking the photos of our failed in-the-field interviews.

Thanks, too, to everyone for sending along their clever captions. Wishing you a restful, birdy-as-heck holiday weekend! I am calling the Hair Club first thing Monday morning.

I've been spending some time lately in GarageBand, the nifty recording software that comes with all Mac computers. It's what I usually use to create my podcast episodes for "This Birding Life." Messing around with sound recording software and equipment is something that I really enjoy—in fact I wish I could do it more often. Way back in the early 1980s, before I went to college, I nearly went to an intensive recording workshop program instead. Why? Because I loved the recording process—recording tracks, layering on effects, building songs out of ideas. And because the recording school looked cool in its advertisements in the back of Rolling Stone.

These days I have to fit the podcast recording and building in among a plethora of other tasks demanding my time. But I still like it when I get to do it. I get into a sort of Zen-like zone with the recording and episode editing.

Recording the original material is the easiest part. I guess I find it really easy to talk to people—my subjects often tell me that I "give good interview." The real work starts with the editing. This is where good software comes in super handy. Once I listen through an entire unedited interview, I go back to the beginning and do an edit pass. Among the things I'm looking to fix are volume anomalies, bits of mis-speak, and extraneous noises (don't make me list them here, please).

After I have a rough audio edit done, I go back through to listen for image cues. If the person speaking mentions something worth illustrating, I jot it down along with a time stamp. Later, once I've acquired the necessary images, I place them in the proper spot in the audio timeline so everything matches up.

Then it's time for a final listen-though to make sure there are no blips, buzzes, jumps, pops, snaps, umms, burps, or other body noises. And once these dragons are all slain, its time to pop the whole thing into my Easy Bake Oven, turn the temperature knob to "podcast" and wait.

I always make two versions of each episode: a plain audio (MP3, with no images) and an enhanced audio (M4a) which has the embedded images. These are uploaded to the Podcast Central server by seasonally-employed podcast elves, and to iTunes by the fabulously tech-savvy Katherine the Good Witch of the Web. And we are officially podcasting to the world.


In 2008, in honor of the centennial of Roger Tory Peterson's birth, and in conjunction with the new Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of North America, I, along with the multi-talented Jeffrey A. Gordon, produced a series of video podcasts. These are available for free from the Peterson Guides site. They cover a variety of species profiles, some bird family overviews, a few tutorials on bird identification, and a couple of biographical sketches of the great RTP himself.


Notice I said video podcasts. These were created in Final Cut, a video editing software that is both wonderful and dauntingly powerful. These podcasts act just like any enhanced audio podcast, except that they can contain video clips, and a variety of more movie-like effects, such as pans, zooms, fades, and so on.



Some day I want to move "This Birding Life" over to video podcast format simply because it's so much more like watching a movie as opposed to watching a slideshow. Besides, many of us now have the capability to watch video over our mobile devices and smart phones.

All I need is time. So if you've got any to spare, send it my way, will you, please?

Well, it's time to record some voice-overs for my next episode of TBL. This next one's about The Big Sit! It should be done and available in a few days. Check-in back here and I'll let you know when it's up.

Until then, please lean close to the microphone and speak slowly and clearly.....

I wonder if any of the Pilgrims or First Peoples at the original Thanksgiving took the time to consider what a cool bird the turkey is. Or did they simply add it to their life list before shooting it with the blunderbuss and dropping it in the big black cauldron? Most ponderable, that.

If you're into learning more about the wild turkey, check out the Peterson Field Guide's video podcast about the species here. Click on the yellow Species Profile tab, then the wild turkey icon.

Wishing you and yours a wonderful Thanksgiving Day with lots of reasons to be both happy and thankful. Beware the tryptophan.

—Bill of the Birds