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The Cornell Guide to Bird Sounds: United States and Canada

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  Hooded Mergansers – photo: Nell Smith I got an exciting email from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology last week. They are using 19 of my bird recordings for an updated version of their Cornell Guide to Bird Sounds: United States and Canada as well as a future update of the Merlin app . Over the past couple years I’ve uploaded over 400 recordings to eBird so 19 may not seem like much but with over 450,000 bird recordings from the United States and Canada in the Macaulay Library, the fact that 19 of my recordings capture something unique or especially clearly is satisfying. I know when I upload recordings to eBird I am, in an abstract way, contributing to science and bird knowledge but it can often feel like no one is actually listening to these recordings. It is a library archive after all, not a social media sharing platform, so it can take years before the value of certain recordings are realized and you can't always predict how they'll be put to use. Having the space to share ...
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Whitewater Draw Mystery

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Listen to this: (Headphones recommended) It's been over a year since I recorded this in March 2019 and I’m only just beginning to understand what it is. We arrived in the dark of night, the graded dirt road violently vibrating my Honda Fit. After a few minutes of straining to hear, I turned off the radio and listened to the sound of every piece of my car and body rattle.  We pulled into the dirt parking area, shut off the engine and stepped outside. Suddenly free from the confines of the car, our ears began to open up beyond the immediate vicinity, expanding outward in every direction into the darkness...until we heard them. My girlfriend Nell and I had come to Whitewater Draw on the last night of February to experience the Sandhill Cranes that winter at this 600-acre wetland in the southeast corner of Arizona. A huge striking bird, I had only previously seen handfuls of migrating cranes off rural county roads outside Phoenix. Hearing tens of thousands of them at night though, di...
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Grassland of the Pipit

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A word of advice: record the places you go. It is easy to forget how remarkable everyday sounds are until you are far away, both in distance and in time. Below is one of the only sound recordings I made during my 2015 field season in the grasslands of Alberta, Canada. One of my tasks for that research project was to conduct line transects where I would write down every bird seen and heard while walking a predetermined line for a set amount of time. Before doing each line transect there is a buffer period where you are required to be still, watch, and listen. On this morning I set up my cheap Zoom H2 field recorder to document the buffer period. (Headphones recommended) At the time I was new enough to birding that I didn’t fully realize I wouldn’t get to hear many of these grassland birds' songs again for a long time, including Savannah Sparrows, Grasshopper Sparrows and Long-billed Curlews. All of these birds stop during migration or even spend winters in Arizona, but while they...
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