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Fwd: FW: Bird songs/golf tournaments




--- "CANFIELD, Chris" <CCANFIELD@Audubon.org> wrote:
> From: "CANFIELD, Chris" <CCANFIELD@Audubon.org>
> To: Kate Finlayson <katefin@yahoo.com>
> Subject: FW: Bird songs/golf tournaments
> Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 13:42:54 -0400
> 
> 
> 
> *****************************************
> Chris Canfield
> Executive Director
> NC State Office, National Audubon Society
> 410 Airport Rd.
> Chapel Hill, NC  27514
> 919-929-3899/fax: 919-929-4599 
> email: ccanfield@audubon.org 
> *****************************************
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug DeNeve [mailto:deneved@hotmail.com] 
> Sent: Friday, September 15, 2000 10:25 AM
> To: DDISHER@concentric.net; crhough@aol.com;
> JMartin978@aol.com;
> nancsom@triad.rr.com
> Subject: Bird songs/golf tournaments
> 
> 
> It looks like this scandal is spreading. This
> article was in the Washington 
> Post a couple of weeks ago. Before long, there may
> be congrssional hearings 
> on the subject! ;-)
> 
> 
> TV Golf, Botching the Birdies
> 
> 
> The Buick Open golf tournament was in Michigan, so
> why was the silvery song 
> of a canyon wren--a bird never seen east of
> Texas--heard on the TV 
> broadcast?
> 
> Later last month, during a broadcast of the PGA
> Championship in Kentucky, 
> birders picked up the thin whistle of a
> white-throated sparrow, not a bird 
> of summer in the South. Last weekend, that sparrow
> called again in a place 
> it does not belong--Ohio, during the NEC
> Invitational.
> 
> E-mails flew, between friends and on birding chat
> lists. Did you hear what I
> 
> heard? Was it possible that CBS, which broadcast
> those tournaments, was 
> dubbing in taped bird calls for viewers at home?
> 
> Well, yes.
> 
> "They have used a [taped] cartridge at one time or
> another," said Leslie Ann
> 
> Wade, vice president of communications for CBS
> Sports. Producers try to use 
> local bird sounds--even putting out a dish of
> birdseed next to a microphone 
> at tournament sites--but cannot always get "ambient
> sound," and therefore 
> turn to tapes, she said.
> 
> (Spokesmen for!
> ABC and NBC deny their networks use taped calls or
> even bird mikes, although
> 
> some viewers say they heard some out-of-place birds
> during the ABC 
> prime-time broadcast on Monday from California
> featuring Tiger Woods and 
> Sergio Garcia.)
> 
> It is hard to know what to think about this. Some
> birders are thrilled that 
> networks want to broadcast any bird sounds--and so
> what if they are 
> misplaced? Everyone knows that TV dresses up the
> real world. Others, already
> 
> down on golf courses because their manicured lawns
> are not bird-friendly, 
> are more ambivalent. A few, though, are ticked off.
> 
> "It's deceitful and overkill--just how perfect do
> they want us to think it 
> is out there?" Gaithersburg birder John Malcolm
> groused. "Why not dub in 
> harp music and rainbows for certain crucial holes?"
> 
> "Besides," he added, "it messes up our harmless
> little hobby"--keeping lists
> 
> of birds heard during golf tournaments.
> 
> Yes, lists. Birders are fanatic list-keepers. Lists
> are a way of pinning 
> down a fleeting,!
> sensory experience. They are a means of collecting
> birds, just as some 
> people collect stamps or antiques, but without
> bringing them home. For some,
> 
> they offer a vehicle to compete with other
> list-keepers.
> 
> A list of the types of lists birders keep would fill
> this newspaper, but 
> here are a few: Birds in their yards. Birds in
> parking lots. Birds on 
> telephone poles, outside the office window, on the
> commute to work.
> 
> Birds in commercials or movie soundtracks are a
> special favorite because 
> they are so often wrong for the time or place.
> Birders know, for example, 
> that the movie "The Last of the Mohicans," set in
> New York, was made in 
> North Carolina because they can identify the calls.
> It was like seeing palm 
> trees at the North Pole.
> 
> It is a special thrill to spot a mistake--a "kind of
> birders' 
> one-upmanship," in the words of veteran Bethesda
> birder Lola Oberman. It 
> shows they know their stuff. And these days, with
> good quality bird-song 
> tapes so widely available, the fashion is t!
> o bird by ear, not just by sight.
> 
> YuLee Larner, a past president of the Virginia
> Society of Ornithology who 
> lives in Staunton, became convinced something odd
> was going on when she 
> noticed the sparrows at recent golf tournaments sang
> "the same thing over 
> and over and over again."
> 
> Birds just don't do that. They vary their song.
> Besides, she pointed out, 
> sparrows do not sing much in summer, after the
> springtime competition for 
> territory and mates.
> 
> "It just seems funny to me," she said. "They try to
> make things sound 
> natural, but a little bit of research would tell
> producers where birds would
> 
> be. They probably didn't think people were paying
> any attention."
> 
> North Carolina birder Patricia Moore, who regularly
> leads bird walks, said 
> she would rather hear no bird songs during golf
> tournaments than hear the 
> incorrect ones.
> 
> "A wrong bird song would be the same as a
> misidentification of a Beethoven 
> symphony," she said. "It would rub a musician the
> wrong way to have 
> something in his music misidentified."
> 
>
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=====
Kate Finlayson
N. Chatham Co.,N.C.
katefin@yahoo.com

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