Year-round vocal activity of two African barbet species

ABSTRACT

Passive acoustic monitoring is a reliable method to study species behaviour and ecology, enabling the discovery of species activity patterns, especially in remote locations. Here, we conducted a year-long recording study to describe annual and circadian patterns in the vocal activity of two African barbet species, the Yellow-rumped Tinkerbird Pogoniulus bilineatus and the Western Tinkerbird Pogoniulus coryphaea. We used automated software to detect vocalisations of the two species from 4893 one-hour recordings taken in Cameroon. In total, we obtained 31,526 vocalisations of Yellow-rumped Tinkerbirds and 1318 vocalisations of Western Tinkerbirds. We used generalised additive mixed models to determine whether the month or hour of recording or meteorological conditions influenced the species’ vocal activity. Our results indicated that both tinkerbirds are likely seasonal breeders, as the highest vocal activity of both species was during the dry season. Both species exhibited smaller activity peaks in the wet season. Our study provides new information on the vocal activity patterns of two barbet species, which could be valuable in future monitoring and surveying efforts. This study provides an illustrative example of two useful technologies that facilitate studies in remote areas: passive acoustic monitoring for determining species’ activity patterns and automatic recognition software for the rapid analysis of large datasets.

KEYWORDS:

• Passive acoustic monitoring
• automatic recognition
• seasonal vocal activity
• activity pattern
• Afromontane species

Acknowledgments

We thank Ernest Vunan Amohlon for his help in organizing fieldwork in Cameroon and all the Kedjom-Keku Community for allowing us to study birds on their land and Dr Moses Njoya from Bamenda University for help in organizing local permits. CPG acknowledges the support of the Ministerio of Educación y Formación Profesional through the Beatriz Galindo Fellowship (Beatriz Galindo—Convocatoria 2020).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request (Dominika Winiarska, email: [email protected]).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2024.2352380

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under [Grant Iuventus Plus no IP2014 005073] awarded to MB, the Polish National Science Centre’s under Grant Opus no UMO-2015/17/B/NZ8/02347) awarded to TSO, and the Project UNIWERSYTET JUTRA II - an integrated development program for Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań under Grant POWR.03.05.00-00-Z303/18 awarded to DW.