ResearchBuzz

CHIRP! The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library’s Web site is now making available over 65,000 sound clips and about 18,000 video clips of birds and animals. You can get your squawk on at http://www.animalbehaviorarchive.org .

You can do a simple search by keyword, or you can do an advanced search for marine vs terrestrial beings as well as searching by location and recording information (at the moment the catalog has a North American emphasis but the site promises to continue to put more clips online.)

I did a simple keyword search for hawk. I got OVER 1300 RESULTS. Results include both audio and video clips. Note that not everything you get in your search results has been digitized yet (the advanced search includes a switch that allows you to include only results with available video or audio clips.) Search results include animal name (common and scientific), date of clip (I saw clips that go back as far as 1951) and contributor, and quality of the clip (rated on a scale from one to five.) A detail page includes the location and duration of the clip.

Clicking on the “play” button (if the play button is gray, the clip is not available; look for blue play buttons) pops up a window that plays the clip with RealPlayer. There’s also a neat feature called RavenViewer that requires a download; RavenViewer allows you to get a visualization of bird calls; play the call and watch a waveform and spectrogram at the same time. (RavenViewer is not available for all the clips that I saw.)

Don’t feel like searching the clips? There’s also a browsing feature that allows you to look at several sets of “best of” — best of long-distance communications, best of territory defense, etc. Lots to browse through here!

I knew sites like YouTube and the various search engine video offerings were taking off, but I became convinced they were headed mainstream when I started getting a lot of press releases about specialty video sites. Like Petfinder’s new PetVideo.com (http://petvideo.com/ ), which features video about — you guessed it — pets.

When I first read the press release I groaned, thinking of endless “America’s Funniest Home Video” stuff where cats fall off the back of chairs, dogs skid all over slick kitchen floors, etc. (Whee.) Instead, PetVideo aims to educate pet owners.

There’s a nav for video by category on the left side of the page, with topics including cat and dog training (with several subcategories), food and nutrition, and health. (If you are looking for funny animal videos, there’s also an “Incredible Pets” category with a “funny” subcategory. Don’t miss the beagle who spins for his dinner.)

Each subcategory (13 videos for litterbox training alone!) Contains extensive descriptions of the video, its rating, and the number of times it’s been viewed. The video pages themselves (videos load very quickly!) have an area for comments and a space for you to rate the video. The user-submitted videos vary, but the ones created by PetVideo seem to be between 1 and 2 minutes long and are nicely produced.