It’s that time again — time for HUMBOLDT BAYWATCH, in which your fearless Baywatchers Midge Martin (of KHUM-FM) and Carol Vander Meer (of Friends of the Dunes) talk about animals.

And you know what? It’s a special edition of Humboldt Bay Watch not only in that is about migratory birds, but in that I’m just gonna shut the hell up with my customary windy introduction. 

You see, people have been begging and pleading and whining and being generally irritating for a while now on the subject of audio transcriptions. And since the Outpost credo is to give the people what they want, and to give it to them good and hard, that is what we’re doing now! Machine transcriptions of audio content on the Outpost henceforth!

Now, the machine is pretty decent but it’s far from perfect, and you’ll certainly notice some howlers in the text below. But the interface is pretty cool. Click on some words in the text below and the audio player will jump roughly to that point in the conversation, and you can hear Midge and Carol spell it out for you in their own voices. Pretty neat! It’s almost as if we got Midge and Carol to narrate this article for you.

Or maybe you don’t care about birds, or Midge, or Carol, and would just like to hassle me to spend lots of time manually making you a transcript of all audio with no spelling or grammatical errors at all? Then here’s what you do: You scroll down to the comment section and spew forth, into the void! ‘Cause it ain’t happenin’, suckers!

Then you should go outside and check out a bird.