The recently introduced shift method is applied to detect and characterize burst-pulse vocalizations produced by marine mammals. To this end, burst pulses are modeled as sequences of click-like events that are repeated after a certain inter-click interval (ICI). The shift method is used to first emphasize events that repeat within an input signal. Afterwards, the ICI can be estimated. A qualitative comparison of the method is made against classical cepstrum using real data. The detection performance is measured using random trials of simulated data with impulsive noise. It is shown that although the cepstrum outperforms in Gaussian noise at low signal-to-noise ratio, the shift method performs significantly better in impulsive noise.