Wildlife Acoustics, Inc. is a company owned by private individuals in the United States. It is located in Maynard, Massachusetts. The company creates tools that use sound to monitor wildlife for scientists, researchers, and government agencies around the world. The company was started in 2003 by Ian Agranat. At first, the company made a product called the Song Sleuth, which was designed to automatically recognize birds by their songs in real time while in the field. Because this idea was too costly for regular customers, the technology behind it was later used to create self-operating machines that record sounds, including those too high-pitched for humans to hear, and software for analyzing these sounds in research.

Products

In early 2020, Wildlife Acoustics introduced the Song Meter Mini and Mini Bat, its smallest bioacoustics recorders. The Mini records sounds humans can hear, such as birds, amphibians, and natural environments. The Mini Bat records sounds too high for humans to hear, like bat calls. These recorders are small and can be controlled using a smartphone or tablet through Bluetooth. Users can check battery and memory status, and the Mini can operate for 240 hours on four AA batteries. It has preset recording schedules, such as recording continuously, at dawn and dusk, or for short periods throughout the day. Users can also create custom schedules and upload them to the device. The recorder includes one microphone, and a second can be added separately.

Since 2007, Wildlife Acoustics has sold Song Meters, which are self-powered, weatherproof recorders for monitoring birds, frogs, and other wildlife. These devices can record for up to 230 hours over months and can be programmed to record at specific times. They come with a standard microphone that captures sounds from all directions. Additional microphones, such as a directional one for bird calls and a hydrophone for underwater sounds, are also available.

In April 2009, Wildlife Acoustics released the SM2BAT, a recorder that can detect ultrasonic sounds. It records at a high sample rate of 192,000 times per second and can save files in a format called zero-cross after recording. The SM2BAT can record two sounds at once, allowing a second microphone to be placed up to 100 meters away. With four memory cards, it can record about 240 nights of bat calls. In August 2009, a version with a higher sample rate of 384,000 times per second was added to capture bat calls with higher frequencies found in parts of Europe.

In May 2011, Wildlife Acoustics released the SM2M, an underwater recorder. It can operate at depths up to 150 meters and record for up to 1,500 hours using 32 standard batteries. It captures sounds from 2 Hz to 48,000 Hz and stores recordings on up to four memory cards.

At the UK National Bat Conference, Wildlife Acoustics announced the Echo Meter, a handheld bat detector available in December 2011. It uses methods like heterodyne, frequency division, and Real Time Expansion (RTE) to detect bats. RTE shifts bat sounds into the audible range while keeping their unique features. The device can record sounds on an SD card and display a real-time spectrogram, which is a visual graph of sound patterns. Users can review past calls and play them back with time expansion.

Song Scope is a software program that lets users view sound recordings as spectrograms and create "recognizers" to automatically search for specific animal calls in recordings.

Patents

Wildlife Acoustics has received the following U.S. patents:

• U.S. Patent 7,454,334 "Method and device for automatically identifying animal species from their sounds"
• U.S. Patent 7,782,195 "Device for low-power autonomous data recording"