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Animal vocalisations contain important information about health, emotional state, and behaviour, thus can be potentially used for animal welfare monitoring and behavioural neuroscience studies. Motivated by the spectro-temporal patterns of chick calls in the time-frequency domain, in this paper we propose an automatic system for chick call recognition using the joint time-frequency scattering (JTFS) transform. Taking full-length recordings as input, the system first extracts chick call candidates by an onset detector and silence removal. After computing their JTFS features, a support vector machine classifier groups each candidate into different chick call types. Evaluating on a dataset comprising 3013 chick calls collected in laboratory conditions, the proposed recognition system using the JTFS features improves the frame- and event-based macro F-measures by 10.2% and 11.7%, respectively, than that of a mel …