Welcome back to the Bee podcast. I am Jacques from Jacques in the Garden and today we have David Mannon, a specialist in bioacoustics. He is actually the founder of Loggerhead Instruments and creator of the Haiku Box, which is a lovely instrument

I've had in my garden now for a few months. I've had a lot of fun with it.

David, why don't you introduce yourself a little bit more and actually tell people what the haiku box is before we dive into our first topic here.

Sure, hi Jacques. So I'm David and I've been a scientist and engineer and I have been studying

bioacoustics for 30 something years.

And so I started, yeah, I started in marine bioacistics, so underwater sounds made by fishes and and have been both at universities and at my company.

So the company started out making underwater

acoustic recorders for scientists.

And we wanted to get into something more that consumers could try out with bioacoustics. So we invented

the haiku box along with some colleagues at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. And so it's a basically a device you plug in outside your house.

It's got a microphone that's always listening for birds.

And when it hears a bird, it'll send that audio clip up to a cloud server and you know detect what species

it is and you so you can go see like you know who's coming by my yard yeah yeah

it's really cool yeah yeah so actually as I mentioned I've had one now for about two months. We got into birding like me, my partner this year and she's way more deep into it than I am. She likes to make her lifeless and collect them. I just like going along for the ride and looking at birds and taking pictures, but it's been really fun to now have names to all the birds that I see in my garden.

So we're going to start off talking about bioacoustics, what they are, what animals make those

sounds and all that, and then we're going to talk later about birds, birds in the garden, because it's just been so much

fun to learn about all these birds.

So I would love to hear more about bioacoustics.

Sort of like it's something I think we've all maybe heard of before,

but you know, there's things like,

I don't even know if these are connected, but there's echolocation, there's bioacistics, I don't know if they're the same thing, but underwater sounds I know is like a huge part of the scientific community.

I used to go to Scripps Institute of Oceanography where they did a lot of

...