I am putting together a short film for the amateur category of the Festival Oiuseau et de la Nature 2013. One of the sequences in this film will be of male ring ouzels singing to each other, declaring territory. The sequence consists of a close shot of one ring ouzel, perched on a chimney tower, and a distant shot of its rival singing on a fence. The rival bird is filmed using a long lens at several hundred metres, so as a result the song is delayed with respect to the video by about a second.

My question is, should I leave the footage with the audio / video timings as I observed them, or for aesthetic purposes should I adjust the audio track on the distant bird so that the beak motion and audio are in time ?

The clip can be seen here:

Singing Ring Ouzels on Vimeo

The off-timing of the audio reminds me of a poor dubbed movie, so I would suggest adjusting it.

Absolutely you have to get rid of the audio delay !
Once filming golf we got the great idear of using a parabol to get the teeoff sound. But the the sound was first heard when the picture had left the golfer and followed the ball in the air - We had to cut the audio in two because we had to cut out (in) the delay of the 300-400 meter teleshot. The delay make no sense when you are looking at a close up off the bird.

Having now adjusted the audio timing, I agree it works much better with the delay eliminated. Thank you for the advice.

Neil