Use of a radio microphone array to study banded‐wren song interactions at the neighborhood level

An array of distributed microphones was used to locate and identify singing banded wrens in Santa Rosa National Park, Costa Rica. Wrens were recorded both during natural singing interactions and during song playback experiments. The array consisted of 11 weatherproofed radio‐microphones distributed among neighborhoods of up to seven banded‐wren territories, with a centrally located radio receiver/recording station. Audio from the radio receivers was stored to a laptop computer using a multichannel data‐acquisition card and custom recording software. Singing birds were located after recording using software developed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bioacoustics Research Program. The system’s durability and flexibility enabled several different array configurations to be tested at two field sites under a range of recording conditions. Preliminary results suggest that this system is a powerful and flexible tool for studying the dynamics of vocal interactions across entire neighborhoods of singing birds.