Establishing direction from a field microphone

[motiheal]

Hi. I am new to this webpage, out of my jargon, but have a specific question that led me here--

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/14349/en/

Is there some kind of microphone that can be placed and left in the woods, recording sounds, perhaps activated by these sounds, but most importantly, establish the direction of the sound? The referenced page seems to say yes, but I cannot glean from it what exactly they mean. This would be for bird research, specifically hearing nesting activity and then being able to locate the nest from sound direction. It would be especially helpful if someone could offer exactly what kind of mic might do this. Thanks, John

[Henrik_Volkers]

It would need more than one mic. Usually one would need at least 3 mics. Or build up an acoustic camera (lot of mics , a lot of hardware)

The mics will be placed outside .. so weather (temp/humidity) and most probably insects and birds will be your enemies 😄

Shure/B&K/MicrotechGefell/PCB(?)  are some possible addresses for such robust outdoor monitoring mics (Just sit down while asking for prices 😉 )

Sampling 3+x channels  and recording .. no big thing

Doing the signal processing ..    is 'simple' physics 😄  

[motiheal]

Thank you for this information!