Maine Owl Monitoring Program

Maine Audubon and MIT Join Forces

Dale Joachin from the MIT Media Laboratory and his graduate students have developed technology that uses modified cell phones to both record and broadcast calls.

The phone devices are controlled remotely through a website, and were field tested for owl surveys last winter in Connecticut.

This year, Maine Audubon’s MOMP volunteers hope to field test the cell phone devices in Maine along their established survey routes in order to gain insight into some long-standing research questions about owl surveys.

Many owl survey methodologies, including the one employed in MOMP, use the playback of recorded owl calls to elicit calls from “real” owls.

What We Hope to Learn

Studies have shown that owl detections are much higher when a playback call is used, compared to surveys where there is only “passive” listening without playbacks.

But some researchers are concerned that the use of the playbacks at one survey point effects owls further down the survey route, especially since almost all standard owl surveys are run in a series of successive points along a road.

The new cell phone technology could shed some light on this and other research questions by allowing for simultaneous recordings from multiple points for long periods of time.

The technology is still under development, but MIT researchers hope to have it to MOMP volunteers for field testing this season.