By Martha Fischer

		Great Blue Heron Photo by Gerrit Vyn

A primary goal of our trip to Florida was to record vocalizations of wading birds: herons, egrets, ibises, spoonbills, and storks. These birds are not terribly vocal and are usually quite shy about people approaching them. How do we get close to vocalizing birds? How do we get close the the birds, period?

Someone told us of the Anhinga Trail in the Everglades National Park. A boardwalk extends over still pools of water in the dry marsh that is the Everglades in winter. These pools attract birds such as Purple Gallinule, Little Blue Heron, and Anhinga. Thousands of people visit the Anhinga Trail, so the birds have become accustomed to human presence.

Aha! we thought. We would go there, walk right up to the birds, record them, and be done. The birds were very accommodating--I got so close to a Double-crested Cormorant, I could have scratched its back! (Okay, I did scratch its back.) Did it vocalize? Not a sound. I got within a couple of feet of a Wood Stork who silently walked away, unconcerned. Imagine the thrill of being so close to these birds! If we'd been photographers, we'd have been happy. But we were recordists; the thrill was mixed with the helpless despair of recording nothing but their silence.

We needed another tack. We ended up in Big Cypress National Preserve, where we drove alongside a water channel. The habitat, in contrast to the Everglades' open marshlands, was second-growth cypress swamp. Over the course of a few days, we learned that the birds along the channel were quite used to people, occasionally retreating into the trees. They were most likely to vocalize at dawn and dusk when tourists were not around to disturb the "natural" soundscape.

Along this road, we recorded White Ibis, Little Blue Heron, Snowy Egret, Great Egret, Great Blue Heron, and Anhinga. Birds at a White Ibis roost were particularly vociferous, and we came away with a very good stereo recording of hundreds of birds coming in to roost during early evening. A bonus bird was King Rail, which we recorded at close range in the vicinity of our campsite.

Martha Fischer is a terrestrial audio archivist in the Macaulay Library.