Birds Make Sound

  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 ...

If you've been reading my blog, maybe my rambling about birds (coupled with a complete lack of public social life and a yearning for brief relief from constant confrontation with the absurd cruelty of present reality) has inspired a bird curiosity . Maybe you've taken note of the birds singing outside and maybe you've even used your phone to record a few minutes of sound. Nice. In my previous post I hinted at the virtues of listening without assigning labels to sounds, but there is a very big flip-side to that: there is also tremendous value in being able to name the birds you hear. Learning the voice and patterns of specific birds not only develops a general listening proficiency, but adds depths of nuance, associations and connections to a purely aesthetic or utilitarian mode of listening. It can turn a bird sound jumble into a choir of kin. Moving beyond a vague concept of “bird”, a named bird becomes familiar. When you observe the behavior of a named bird, such as a Gr...