Round Robin » sounds

Listen to the Winners From Studio 360′s Birdsong-Into-Music Challenge

Hugh — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:59:41 +0000

Last month, along with the rest of us, the national radio program Studio 360 started getting spring fever. In anticipation of warmer temps and returning songbirds, they issued a challenge to their listeners: Remix Spring—and they’ve just announced the winners.

The idea was to celebrate the annual burst of music that arrives each spring as songbirds rise early and belt out their best melodies. Working with the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library, they chose 10 birds from our 150,000-song archive and put the recordings on their website for download. Audio curator Greg Budney helped narrow down the list and appeared on the program to kick off the challenge.

Listeners simply had to incorporate one or more of the songs into a piece of music that they composed. The show’s producers received more than 100 entries in genres ranging from classical to electronica.

This weekend they announced the overall winner and two judges’ favorites. The winner, Marlo Reynolds, composed a jazzy collage called “Certhia Americana.” The title refers to the Brown Creeper, whose sharp, insistent song runs throughout the piece. Filling out the music is a spoken-word performance that remixes written descriptions from our All About Birds species account into a meditative poem. Here it is:

The show also posted all the entries to their page for anyone who wants to have a listening party and witness the full range of creativity of Studio 360′s listeners—including a melancholy loon accompanied by banjo, a dancefloor workout bubbling with the likes of Ruffed Grouse, Wood Thrushes, and Canyon Wrens, and a tension-filled piece that sets a Common Loon and a Winter Wren against a choir to arrive at something you might hear on a Bourne Identity soundtrack. Listen for yourself.

(Image by Kelly Colgan Azar via Birdshare)

New Macaulay Library clips let you listen to gibbons hoot in Thailand’s forests

Hugh — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 16:59:33 +0000

The Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library is the world’s largest and oldest archive of natural sounds and video, and you can browse its holdings online. Though it’s best known for its bird recordings, the Macaulay Library also features insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals—including a recent addition: gibbons recorded in the wild in Thailand. They’re the work of Warren Brockelman, who spent years studying the apes and recently added his recordings to the archive.

“The beautiful movements of gibbons in the trees and their incredible songs whetted my appetite for studying them in the wild,” recalled ecologist Warren Brockelman (B.A. Cornell ’63; at left). Brockelman first encountered gibbons while working for the army in a Bangkok field laboratory during the Vietnam War. After the war he settled in Thailand (his wife is a Thai zoologist) and in 1976 began doing gibbon research in the Khao Yai National Park, a large reserve about three hours northeast of Bangkok. He concentrated on two species in particular, the white-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) and the endangered pileated gibbon (Hylobates pileatus).

As he worked in the jungle, Brockelman was entranced by the duets of the gibbons, their voices falling, rising, and carrying for more than a mile. Then he got close enough with his trusty reel-to-reel Nagra SN recorder (first developed for spy agencies and the film industry) to pick up the softer sounds that other recordists had missed. “One thing that gibbons ‘talk’ about is threats,” Brockelman says, “When I heard a soft, barely audible hu-hu-hu-hu above me it meant that the male had detected me below, and the group immediately stopped what it was doing.” There are about 10-15 distinct sounds in the gibbon “vocabulary.”

Even when they sing together, mated male and female gibbons don’t sing the same song. The distinctive female part is the “great call,” a series of hoots lasting 15 to 20 seconds. “One of my most important findings was that young gibbons do not learn to sing the species-specific patterns of their duets, but the patterns are rather strictly inherited,” Brockelman explains. “They appear to have no attributes of language as it is defined for humans. They are rigid and stereotyped, like bird song—even more so because some birds can learn new phrases.” Females usually initiate the duet with a quiet hua-hua sound. Brockelman and his colleagues also brought much new information to light about gibbon society, including how slowly populations grow—a mated pair produces a single offspring only once every three years.

Even working in an environment populated with wild elephants, cobras, tree vipers, pythons, bears, and (at that time) tigers, Brockelman says the biggest scare came from his own species. Half a dozen insurgents once held him at gunpoint with AK-47 rifles. He managed to talk them into letting him go. “Wild animals are much more predictable,” says Brockelman.

When Brockelman decided it was time to preserve his recordings, he turned to the Macaulay Library. He worked with archivist David McCartt to preserve his written data and turn the analog recordings into digital files. Because the tapes were stored for more than 30 years, sometimes in damp conditions, the process was more complicated than you might expect. Macaulay Library engineer Karl Fiske jury-rigged a device that meant hand-winding the old tapes past Q-tips to clean the tapes. But it worked like a charm, and about half the recordings have been digitized. Brockelman expects to visit again next year to archive the rest.

“Warren kept very organized records,” says McCartt. “I think he’s like a lot of researchers who are now looking for a place where they can permanently archive their work and know it will be well cared for and available to everyone.”

Listen to a few of Brockelman’s gibbon recordings:

White-handed gibbon 1 (male and female duet; 1980)
White-handed gibbon 2 (male and female duet; 1980)
Pileated gibbon (male and female duet, with young female joining in; 1980)

(This post was written by Pat Leonard. Photos courtesy of Warren Brockelman.)

With Digitization Complete, Hear 7 of the Coolest Natural Sounds in Our Archive

Hugh — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:58:18 +0000

To a computer, it’s just a complex combination of ones and zeros. Decoded for our ears, it becomes wondrous sound—a symphony, or the song of a lark. Thanks to digital technology, recordings of bird, insect, mammal, fish, and amphibian voices in the Lab’s Macaulay Library will last virtually forever. It’s taken more than 12 years, but all archived reel-to-reel analog recordings going back to 1929 have now been digitized to the highest industry standards and made available online. It’s a major milestone.

“Our audio collection is the largest and the oldest,” explains Macaulay Library director Mike Webster. “Now, it’s also the most accessible. Having the collection digitized brings the Macaulay Library into the 21st century. Now we’re working to improve search functions and create tools people can use to collect recordings and upload them directly to the archive.”

The audio and video recordings are searchable and free to play online, whether to brush up on familiar sounds or to explore the nooks and crannies of the wider world. As a sort of sampler plate, we’ve compiled a list of seven great sounds plus a video—they’re listed at the end of this post.

The archive now contains about 150,000 audio recordings: 10 terabytes of data with a total run time of 7,513 hours (313 days). More than 7,000 species are represented, with a heavy emphasis on birds. But you’ll also find whales, elephants, frogs, tigers, primates, and more. New material is coming in all the time from recordists around the world, both amateur and professional.

In all, 18 audio archivists took part in digitizing the sounds. Archivist Martha Fischer takes the award for most clips: she handled more than 17,000 recordings since 2000. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Older tapes were often in poor condition. Saving a recording sometimes meant heating the tape in a vacuum oven to reseal shedding oxide particles and get perhaps one or two more passes through a playback machine. You might have only one chance to get it right.

It can be a strain to listen intensely all day. “I do get a little squirrely, sometimes,” Fischer said. “But it’s a nice feeling to know I’ve contributed to making all this material available to people.” But some moments transported her to another time and place. A dawn chorus recording featuring 19 bird species in Queensland, Australia, captured by recordist Eleanor Brown, is one of her favorites. Fischer also mentions recordings of the indri, a large lemur native to Madagascar, with an unforgettable voice (see list, below).

And sometimes archivists hear more than the intended target. “Snoring,” Fischer laughs. “I’ve heard dogs barking, construction, cars, chimps passing gas, and a lot of stomach rumblings.” Collecting the recordings can apparently be tiring, hungry work, too.

The archive cannot rest on its laurels however. In addition to collecting new material, the technology is always changing so even digitized material will likely have to be migrated to new media types in the future. What will remain the same, though, is the human need to listen and perhaps better understand the many creatures who share the planet with us.

“Sound is a huge component of most animals, including most vertebrates and insects, “Webster says. “I think you don’t really know an animal until you pay attention to the sounds it makes. I feel people are missing a lot about nature itself if they don’t experience it with their ears.”

A Sampler: Seven Top Sounds—Plus a Video

Earliest recording: Cornell Lab founder Arthur Allen was a pioneer in sound recording. On a spring day in 1929 he recorded this Song Sparrow sounding much as they do today.
Youngest bird: This clip from 1966 records the sounds of an Ostrich chick while it is still inside the egg—and the researchers as they watch.
Liveliest wake-up call: A dawn chorus in tropical Queensland, Australia is bursting at the seams with warbles, squeals, whistles, booms, and hoots.
Best candidate to appear on a John Coltrane record: The indri, a lemur with a voice that is part moan, part jazz clarinet.
Most spines tingled: The incomparable voice of a Common Loon on an Adirondacks lake in 1992.
Most likely to be mistaken for aliens arriving: Birds-of-paradise make some amazing sounds—here’s the UFO-sound of a Curl-crested Manucode in New Guinea.
The unrivaled repertoire of Homo sapiens: Here’s an amazing recording of a temple ceremony in Vrindavan, India, combining drums, gongs, voices, wind, brass, and strings.
Living up to its name: Our video archive is a great place to peek at an animal’s behavioral style. This American Dipper—our only aquatic songbird—looks fully at home as it bobs and walks underwater in an Alaska stream.

(This post was written by Pat Leonard. Image: Common Loon by Raymond Lee via Birdshare.)

What we do: 8 TED-style talks about birds and saving the world

Hugh — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:42:52 +0000

At an event in Washington, DC, this weekend, Cornell Lab directors presented a set of short, crisp, exciting talks about the work that we do. They’re a great introduction to the kinds of exciting research, conservation, and outreach that consume our lives.

Lab director John Fitzpatrick kicked things off with his argument that birds really can save the world, by capturing our imaginations and inspiring us to great things. Subsequent talks covered the contributions of citizen science to conservation policy, the enormous communicative power of high-resolution nest cameras, our unique approach to education, and more.

As a special treat, the session closed with the full Birds-of-Paradise Project lecture by Cornell Lab scientist Ed Scholes and National Geographic photographer Tim Laman. They showed some of the amazing video they collected and described the behind-the-scenes details of their eight-year project.

About 250 people attended the event, and more than a hundred viewed the event live as we streamed it online. If you missed the talks, you can watch the archived versions here. To help you navigate through the 2.5-hour video, here are the times at which each speaker begins his or her presentation:

5:34 John Fitzpatrick: Birds can save the world
22:55 Ken Rosenberg: How eBird lists affect national conservation poicy
31:00 Chris Clark: Listening to whales in a noisy ocean
43:45 Miyoko Chu: Bird Cams—Hawks, herons and other stars of the small screen
52:12 Nancy Trautmann: Connecting kids with science and nature through birds
57:53 Miyoko Chu: Merlin—Can a computer ID your bird?
1:06:30 Mike Webster: Digital ornithology
1:16:10 Gerrit Vyn: Filming the Spoon-billed Sandpiper
1:26:30 Birds-of-Paradise introductory video
1:32:15 Tim Laman and Ed Scholes: Birds-of-Paradise presentation.

A New Generation of “Digital Ornithologists”

Hugh — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:44:13 +0000

It’s an exciting time to be in field biology—the naturalists of today have more tools at their disposal than ever before. To learn how to use those tools, a group of Cornell students have been spending this summer in the field; and Abby McBride, a summer writing intern, accompanied them in the field to write the following report. Abby is a recent graduate of the science writing program at MIT, an accomplished writer and illustrator, and a former field biologist herself (see more of her work on her blog). Here’s her story:

It was Friday morning in a forest of upstate New York, and Cornell undergraduates Hilary Yu and Jen Goforth had been craning their necks for half an hour, eyes glued on a well-hidden Scarlet Tanager nest. They held a high-definition camera at the ready, though the tanager parents had gone foraging and the nestlings were tucked away out of sight. At one point, “I saw something, a shape, come down,” Yu said. “But I thought it was just a leaf falling.”

Finally the parents returned—a brilliant red male with black wings, and a female of subdued green. But oddly, neither of them flew to the nest. The female just flitted lower and lower to the ground, chirping all the while.

A little gray fluffball appeared out of nowhere and began streaking across the leaf litter. It was a Scarlet Tanager fledgling: a disheveled, half-grown bird whose oversized bill gave it a comically reproachful expression. It had hatched only about 10 days before.

The newly liberated fledgling ran and fluttered along the forest floor with its parents trailing behind and the camera-toting students in hot pursuit. Taking care not to come too close, they just barely managed to keep track of the cryptic little figure. “We almost lost it twice,” Yu said.

Finally the runaway came to a halt and the students could carry out their mission: collecting a professional-quality digital record of the fledgling’s first few hours outside the nest. Quickly setting up their camera—borrowed from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab—they captured clip after clip of footage, including the following seldom-seen moment in the lives of tanagers.

Yu, a sophomore from California, and Goforth, a senior from Kansas, are ornithologists-in-training in a program called Cornell Expeditions in Field Ornithology, founded last fall by Dr. David Winkler of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. This summer they and several other students braved bugs, heat, and poison ivy to spend hours every day in the forest, studying Scarlet Tanagers and other members of the cardinal family.

Collecting data on these colorful birds has taught the students many age-old techniques of field ornithology—and some cutting-edge research skills, too. The tools of their trade include not only binoculars, mist-nets, and banding pliers but also digital cameras, recorders, and microphones. As Winkler puts it, these students represent the first generation of “digital ornithologists”—with tools at their disposal that didn’t exist when he and his colleagues were being trained.

Digital recordings—and the computing power to store and organize them—have only recently become commonplace in fieldwork. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and a single video or audio clip, like the movie of the hungry fledgling, is packed with information. Scientists and nonscientists alike can watch, listen to, and learn from such events, which they might never experience firsthand.

Armed with digital equipment, the students are doing more than just recording data. Rising sophomore Eric Gulson of Veracruz, Mexico, noticed that the Scarlet Tanager fledgling was making an interesting veer sound, similar to the call of a Veery (listen to a Veery call). He recorded the call and found that it has not yet been described in the authoritative Birds of North America Online, nor is it part of the Macaulay Library’s audio collection. The group also recorded the calls of a nesting female tanager, another new find for the Library.

Here’s a clip from Gulson’s recording of the veer call:

The budding biologists are getting a summer of well-rounded training. They have been up to all sorts of exploits in field ornithology—both traditional and digital—many of which they have written about on their blog. Earlier in the season, the group devised a way to hoist mist nets 50 feet into the canopy, in an attempt to capture and band the high-flying tanagers. With the help of climbing experts from Cornell Outdoor Education, the students even learned to climb into the treetops—cameras in tow—to photograph nests.

Several members of the group were lucky enough to go on a field research trip to Borneo, where they have been exercising the same digital and field skills on the other side of the world.

Now that the breeding season is winding down in upstate New York, the students have been curating their multimedia—which includes dozens of audio recordings, nearly 100 videos, and hundreds of photographs—and organizing all of the data they’ve collected. They have also been writing standard operating procedures so that new students can pick up the research next year.

Not bad for a group of students with little to no previous experience in field research. “Some of these kids had never looked for a nest before,” says Emma Greig, a postdoctoral researcher in the Macaulay Library who has been supervising the group. But over the course of the summer the students have switched over from learning new skills to working independently. “They’ve really become self-sufficient,” Greig says. The young digital ornithologists are nearly ready to strike out on their own.

(Credits: Sketches by Abby McBride; tanager photos by Hilary Yu; tanager recording by Eric Gulson; tanager video by Hilary Yu and Jen Goforth. Recordings used courtesy Macaulay Library.)

Peek Into a Puffin Burrow in Iceland [sounds and video]

Hugh — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 22:14:13 +0000

Studying puffins in Iceland, where the birds are numerous but also vulnerable to changes in climate and oceans, is important work—but it doesn’t always look like it. Researchers like Erpur Hansen who want to know how the breeding season is going have to figure out how to look inside puffin nests dug into the ground. It’s not as convenient as raising the lid on a bluebird box or pulling back some twigs to peer in at a cardinal. Fortunately, Hansen has technology: a “burrow cam.”

It’s a miniature camera on a long, flexible cable, connected to a set of video goggles that lets Hansen see what the camera sees. Wearing the gray plastic device he looks rather like Geordi LaForge, the blind engineer in Star Trek: The Next Generation—and he has to be careful when he moves around, because although the goggles let him see through the camera, he can’t see directly in front of him.

It’s also quite difficult to thread the camera four feet or more into the burrow and keep it pointed in the right direction, so Hansen and his assistant, Nick Richardson, spend a lot of time lying face down in the grass, their arms stuck into burrow entrances, with hoods pulled over their heads to cut the sun’s glare on the goggles. If you didn’t know what they were doing, you might think they were looking for a contact lens or perhaps coping with a severe headache.

But wearing the goggles is something else entirely. When I put them on it was suddenly as if I was actually in the burrow. I kept moving my head around to try and see around corners—until I remembered I needed to move the camera instead. As the camera advanced slowly along the burrow (lit with infrared lights that the puffins can’t see), I felt as if I were exploring a cave, brushing past hanging roots, tiptoeing around rocks, and trying to remember which way was up as the view rotated away from the horizontal.

I had to keep the camera pointed toward the darkest part of the image—that’s the empty interior of the burrow. Usually, a pale shape would pop into view, which my mind would quickly rearrange into parts of a puffin: the white breast and curving black throat; the pale cheek, dark eyestripes, and even an eye, blinking at me; the big bill with its curving grooves marking the age of the puffin; and sometimes a smooth egg tucked under one wing.

The video screens in the goggles are very small, so they don’t record very well. But I tried anyway, using my iPhone, so that you could get an idea of what burrow-camming is like. It’s not as good as wearing the goggles yourself, but watch this video and see how soon you can make out the puffin at the end of the burrow, and its egg:

The video doesn’t include sound, but seabird colonies are noisy places. Here are a couple of examples:

Listen to the strange, amusing whoops of Common Eiders on a quiet day at Vigur Island (with Arctic Terns, Black Guillemots, and Meadow Pipits):

Listen to the hubbub of Northern Fulmars, Black-legged Kittiwakes, and tens of thousands of puffins, Common Murres, Thick-billed Murres, and Razorbills at Drangey Island:

(Images by Hugh Powell. Watch for the full puffin story to appear in Living Bird magazine in the coming year.)

A Tour of Australia’s Wet Tropics Endemics: Part Two [With Kookaburras!]

Hugh — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:45:37 +0000

This is Part Two of a post about searching for the 12 endemic birds of northeast Queensland’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Reserve, with the help of many of the region’s wonderful guides and lodges. Part One of the story is here. Part Two introduces six endemic species not mentioned in Part One: Grey-headed Robin, Bridled Honeyeater, Bower’s Shrike-Thrush, Atherton Scrubwren, Mountain Thornbill, and Chowchilla.

If aliens were invading Earth and you had just half a day in which to see the 12 endemic birds of Australia’s Wet Tropics (see Part One), your best bet might be a drive up Mt. Lewis, just outside the hamlet of Julatten. Especially if the aliens were willing to let you take along Del Richards, of Fine Feather Tours, as a guide. A wiry 70-year-old with a quiet manner and an impressive roster of bird calls he can mimic, Del drove us up Mt. Lewis for a six-hour parade of rarities and endemics. Over just a few miles and a few thousand feet of elevation gain, we saw 8 of the 12 endemics that lure birders to this part of Queensland—and I got the distinct feeling Del was saving the others so we’d have something left for the second half of the week.

Del picked us up at Kingfisher Park Birdwatchers Lodge, a small lodge/caravan park run by two expat British birders, Keith and Lindsey Fisher. Kingfisher is itself a remarkable spot for both birds and strange Australian mammals. We didn’t see regional endemic birds here, but Keith showed us the way to a few unforgettable Australian specialties nonetheless, including kookaburras, a Channel-billed Cuckoo with a bill like a toucan’s, and a Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher.

Kingfisher Park in the Dark

When night falls, Keith turns into something of a mammalogist—he leads nighttime prowls to look for bandicoots, gliders, quolls, and melomys, as well as frogs and owls. At the edge of a pasture we awakened a group of Laughing Kookaburras, which filled the air with their incredible, unhinged-sounding voices. For a few minutes it actually sounded like aliens were invading Earth. This is what we heard (recorded on my iPhone):

A bit later we rustled up some Blue-winged Kookaburras as well. Where Laughing Kookaburras can look cute and harmless, Blue-winged Kookaburras, with their enormous heads and staring yellow eyes, look like escapees from an asylum.

Down along the creek behind Kingfisher Park we walked around a sort of drowned orchard left over from previous owners. Marvelous fruits hung from twigs or collected in heaps underneath: starfruit, mango, longgon, rambutan, custard apple, and others. After the week’s heavy rains, the ground squelched under foot. Small, quick mosquitoes swarmed over our elbows and ankles. Noisy Pittas called from the depths of the forest, and later we glimpsed the flat tail of a feathertail glider hanging over the edge of a palm frond, as if he’d forgotten to pull it up out of view after landing. A couple of Spectacled Monarchs (looking like a cross between a Phainopepla and a Blackburnian Warbler) roosted on loops of vine about four feet over our heads, and we found them with our flashlight beams. At dinner, a forest dragon sat by the bird feeders in the light of the patio.

Parade on Mt Lewis

Del arrived in a cream-colored Land Cruiser, immaculately kept and sturdily built in the last century, with carpet lining the dashboard and stiff leather seats. He’s thin and silver-haired, an ex-cattleman who has been leading nature tours for 30 years. He wears a wide-brimmed leather hat—ubiquitous in Australia—with feathers in the hatband. Del climbed carefully aboard, remarking that he was just back to work after knee surgery (“my seventh knee if you count the two I started with”), and we wound around the narrow roads. We passed Julatten’s football field, tennis court, and public library in one go, and turned onto the narrow strip of asphalt that leads to Mt. Lewis.

I was struck everywhere I went by how familiar the tropical vegetation looked and how unfamiliar the birds were. I’m sure the plant species were as unique as any of the birds, but to the casual observer the dense walls of dark green that climbed the hillsides, the tree ferns that spread out like table umbrellas, and the thorn-encumbered palm fronds looked familiar from my visits to Panama and Costa Rica. And just as in Central America, we entered the forest only gradually: first cruising through cattle pastures, and then into the broken shade of the first scraggly trees bending over the road. The asphalt disappeared and Del began negotiating the Land Cruiser around chuckholes and over washboards. Clouds descended, and the vegetation became thicker and wetter.

We were using one of the standard ploys of bird watchers the world over: drive a dirt road up a mountain, and watch the birds change as you climb through elevations and habitats. Every time we stopped the car we heard unusual sounds—the sharp descending notes of Yellow-spotted Honeyeaters; the thin trills of a Chestnut-breasted Cuckoo. Each time, Del’s fingers hovered over the ignition key as he gauged whether to stop against his goal of reaching the grassy end of the road, where Blue-faced Parrot-Finches cling to seedheads and Australian King-Parrots wing over.

Foraging flocks of 20 birds or more made their stately way over the road through the twigs, vine tangles, and crumpled brown leaves. In one of these, a parade of little warbler- and vireo-like birds turned into something of an endemic explosion: As Fairy Gerygones chattered in the canopy, a Mountain Thornbill worked its way down slender vines and a couple of Atherton Scrubwrens came up from the midstory to meet it. Suddenly a longer bird with a heavier bill hopped in to have a look around: a Bower’s Shrike-Thrush making its way methodically through, a bit like a Summer Tanager might move (my colleague Mike Weedon got some good photos). Below them, along the road-edges, Grey-headed Robins were both common and showy. These rich-brown, short-tailed birds swooped from ground to low perch and then stood at attention (not unlike an American Robin’s alert posture, although the two species are not the least bit closely related).

One of my favorite activities in Australia was working through the honeyeater family and its 70+ species. Around Mt. Lewis and Kingfisher Park I puzzled over Graceful, Yellow-spotted, Lewin’s, and Bridled honeyeaters. All of these are smoothly colored olive-green birds, each with a prominent dot, crescent, or teardrop on the side of the face. Yellow-spotted were perhaps the most common; Graceful were a bit daintier (see photo here), but hard to distinguish alone; Lewin’s was larger and darker on the head. And now, at the top of Mt. Lewis, Bridled Honeyeater, the one with the stormiest coloring, and the least yellow, made an appearance high in the treetops.

At the top of Mt Lewis, Del showed us one of the gaudiest finches I’ve ever seen, the Blue-faced Parrot-Finch, and then gestured down a dirt track at a Golden Bowerbird territory he knew about. But it was getting late—shadows were already making it hard to see under the canopy—and anyway Del wanted his guiding friends David “Chook” Crawford and Alan Gillanders to have their chance to show us some new species, too.

As we jounced back down the mountain, a couple of dark birds scampered off the side of the road and Del whispered “Chowchillas!”—our last regional endemic for the day. We crept to the edge of the road and looked what seemed like straight down a steep, leafy slope. Chowchillas are long-legged, sociable birds that haunt the understory. They are smartly colored in rich dark brown with white (male) or buffy (female) underparts. In the gloomy understory they were almost invisible, but my binoculars gathered just enough light to make out the bold, staring eyering and their gingerish way of stepping through the leaves. After my eyes adjusted, I could see 6 or 8 of them scattered down the slope. These large groups spend so much time together that their songs are a group effort, with some of the birds shouting “Chow” and others “Chilla” in a tight, circular rhythm [listen].

As we got in the Land Cruiser to head back down, I half-wondered if it was the sound of aliens invading. But then I remembered, of course—all these outlandish creatures live here, and I’m the alien.

(Photos iphoniscoped by Hugh Powell. The Laughing Kookaburra pic was taken at Villa Marine, a delightful accommodation in the town of Yorkeys Knob adjacent to Cairns.)

Eleven Out of Twelve: a Tour of Australia’s Wet Tropics Endemics (Part 1)

Hugh — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:33:12 +0000

This is Part 1 of an account—for any of you who love tales of unusual birds in unusual places—of a recent trip to Australia’s Wet Tropics region near Cairns, Queensland. In this Part we will discuss: Macleay’s Honeyeater, Victoria’s Riflebird, Pied Monarch, Golden Bowerbird, Tooth-billed Bowerbird, and the abominable Fernwren. Read Part Two here.

Birders love endemics—species you can see in only one place in the entire world. They provide excellent incentive to travel and, once you see them, you carry their memories in your mind like stamps in a passport. And Australia is a fantastic place for endemics. I saw my first endemic early on my first morning—an Australian Brush-Turkey strutting along a footpath at the Cairns Botanic Gardens, its bright-red head as bare as a vulture’s.

When talking about Australian endemics, it helps to be specific. As a result of its geographic isolation, Australia is crawling with them. And not just kangaroos and koalas; Australia has some 330 bird species that occur noplace else. (The similarly sized continental U.S. holds only about 16 endemics.) I shook off the thrill of the brush-turkey and set my mind on the dozen endemic species that can be found within a half-day’s drive of Cairns.

I was visiting Australia’s Wet Tropics, a slender band of World Heritage Area rainforests surrounded by sugarcane and dairy farms, where 12 endemic birds live among some 350 other species. Scattered among the tiny towns and backroads are a handful of lodges that specialize in helping birders see the local specialties, and I was lucky enough to go birding there in late April with a couple of other journalists (Ed Williams of BirdLife Australia and Mike Weedon of UK’s Bird Watching magazine). The places range from modest homes nestled under rainforest canopies to posh ecoresorts with gourmet chefs, exquisite settings, and amenities fully capable of satisfying a group’s nonbirding members. After a week I had found 11 of the 12 endemics, and as I followed from one to the next, they led me to find a couple hundred of the region’s astounding bird species.

My first Wet Tropics endemic was a group of Macleay’s Honeyeaters. They were sipping nectar from a feeder and dodging attacks by a temperamental Helmeted Friarbird. This was on the back deck of Cassowary House, the home of Sue and Phil Gregory, just outside the town of Kuranda. To my eye, honeyeaters are a bit like the dazzlingly diverse tanagers of Central and South America. Though honeyeaters don’t reach the gaudy heights of, say, Paradise Tanagers, they’re more elegantly proportioned, with longer necks and gracefully curved bills. And like tanagers, some species that look unimpressive in the field guide take on a complex beauty when seen in real life. Macleay’s is like that—on paper, a scruffy mix of yellow streaks on a brownish green body. In life, the green acquires a shimmer and the yellow streaks seem sharply painted, floating over the background color.

The second endemic showed up the next morning as the gloom of dawn simmered out of the rainforest. We had gotten up early to watch musky rat-kangaroos—sharp-featured, reddish-brown creatures thought to be early ancestors of kangaroos. Through the dripping palms and vines came a large songbird with a finely streaked breast, buffy eyebrow, and a long, hefty, decurved bill. This was a gentle introduction to the most fantastical of all bird families, the birds-of-paradise—a female Victoria’s Riflebird. Two days later I saw a male, an absurd creature with a glossy black cape of feathers and flashes of electric blue in the throat, crown, and tail. The male’s feathers (but not the female’s) make a distinctive rustling in flight, like the sound of taffeta. A few times I saw a male perched on a high snag, puffing out its feathers and raising its rounded wings over its head one at a time—a young male practicing a courtship display.

One of the most famous rivers in Queensland’s Wet Tropics is the Daintree, where lowland rainforest remains and people take riverboat rides to see crocodiles, Black-necked Storks, and Great-billed Herons. Trish and Andrew Forsyth, who run Red Mill House, took me out birding here and found a Buff-breasted Paradise-Kingfisher still hanging around—most have left for winter in Papua New Guinea by the end of April. In a giant mixed flock of foraging birds we found at least three Pied Monarchs—my third endemic. Though they look superficially like flycatchers, they forage more like kinglets, constantly flicking, hopping, and clinging momentarily to the undersides of tree branches. As the name suggests, they’re black and white, but a rich white patch on the neck seems especially luminous and rich, almost like the bird is wearing a ruff.

West of Cairns, at about 2,000 feet elevation, lies a volcanic region called the Atherton Tablelands. It’s a mite cooler than the lowlands, and endemics lurk in the patches of misty rainforest that cling to peaks. A remarkable naturalist named Alan Gillanders showed us some of his favorite spots, including Mt. Hypipamee National Park, where my fourth endemic, the Golden Bowerbird, builds its monuments. The bowers are easier to find than the birds, and Gillanders led us right up to one. It wasn’t the immaculately curated, color-coordinated showpiece that you may have seen in magazines—those belong to other species. Golden Bowerbirds pile curved sticks into impressively untidy heaps about four feet high. The collection looks a bit like a gigantic one of those chocolate-covered chow mein spiders that kids make at Halloween. The twigs are in fact all stuck together by a curious, invisible fungus that grows through them shortly after the bird puts them in place. As for the bird itself, we heard it before we saw it. The song, as such, is one of the most unusual noises I’ve ever heard come out of a bird—a rhythmic rolling that sounds like a piece of machinery. The bird was perched low in the understory, a smear of lustrous yellow against the dim light.

(Later on, Jon Nott of Rose Gums Wilderness Retreat took us out to see a platypus sculling through a lily pond. Though not technically a regional endemic—or a bird—it was one of the highlights of the trip all the same.)

My fifth endemic was another bowerbird, but it was up to me to ferret it out alone. Our group had seen one a few days earlier, but it was that worst sort of sighting where three people are looking at a cluster of leaves that may or may not be shaking. In one moment, the head of a Tooth-billed Bowerbird pops out, looks at the assembled birders first with one eye and then the next, and then disappears. One person shouts, “Tooth-billed Bowerbird!”, the next shouts, “Tooth-billed Bowerbird!”, and the third is looking a little too far to the right. As annoying as it is at the time, this is usually for the best, because it forces you to go out and get a proper, satisfying look at the bird yourself. I got some advice on where to find one from a free birding app for the region, and that’s how I spent three hours walking around Wongabel State Forest.

I saw displaying riflebirds, an endemic scrubwren and an endemic robin (more about them in Part 2), and heard the amazing sci-fi sounds of duetting Eastern Whipbirds (listen) and the aggravated mewling of Spotted Catbirds (listen)—a big, green-backed, yellow-billed relative of the bird I was seeking. My problem was that Tooth-billed Bowerbirds spend April sitting quietly in the midstory. The best time to find them is during their breeding season, when they give out hoarse squawks and turn over leaves, pale side up, on the forest floor to use as a sort of courting stage.

Just as I was coming back out of the forest, I heard a quick rush of wings and somehow knew, by its very unobtrusiveness, that I’d found one. It turned out these birds really are the kind that look drab in life as well as in the field guide—a brown bird with heavy brown streaks and a thick, slightly hooked black bill. Still, there was something about this bird that struck me—maybe it was the just-in-time sighting, or its patient silence just off the trail, or the simple weirdness of this family, the heftiness of the bird, its unfamiliar proportions, its thick neck and short tail, that brought home what a strange place I had been walking around in for the past week.

And that’s it—you can stop reading the post at this point, because the sixth endemic in Part 1 is the one I didn’t get: the Fernwren. We thought we’d heard one about halfway through the week, but it turned out to be the rare-but-not-endemic Chestnut-breasted Cuckoo (more on that in Part 2). We listened for one at Mt. Hypipamee, as the thrill of the Golden Bowerbird was settling in, while German tourists strode up the path, out of sight, and back down again. Next I followed the app’s suggestions to a forest at nearby Lake Barrine National Park. There I saw many beautiful honeyeaters, more riflebirds than I could have imagined possible back on day 1, plus clouds of vireo-like “gerygones” twittering overhead, screeching cockatoos, bucketloads of brush-turkeys, and little Red-browed Finches making nests in tree ferns.

But no Fernwrens. I spent the last 45 minutes before I left the tablelands listening for these shy little ground birds beside a creek, as wait-a-while vines tore at my clothes, and some (probably endemic) species of chigger bored into my legs, and the region’s infamous heat-seeking leeches inched up my trousers. Of course, people always say you have to leave something to come back for. And I tried to repeat that to myself as I drove toward the airport.

In Part 2, I recount an extraordinary day birding on Mt. Lewis near the town of Mareeba, where a quiet, patient guide named Del Richards helped us find the other six endemics in a single afternoon. I saw several of these species again, elsewhere in my travels, but Mt. Lewis was the first place I saw these six, and it stands out as an epic day of birding in a strange land.

(Images: Macleay’s Honeyeater by JJ Harrison; Victoria’s Riflebirds by Kelson; Pied Monarch and Fernwren by Tim Lenz; Golden Bowerbird by David Cook, all Creative Commons licensed or used with permission; Tooth-billed Bowerbird painting by Richard Bowdler Sharpe [public domain]. Look for more stories about science and conservation in northeastern Australia in upcoming issues of Living Bird magazine.)

Birds on Film: 10 Must-See Video Moments

admin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:39:18 +0000

Yesterday we suggested a few good books about birding (and got many more from commenters and Facebook fans—thanks!). But you can’t read all the time—so here are a few moments of video to immerse you in the color, sound, behavior, and diversity of birds. These first five are our own multimedia productions (see more at our YouTube channel):

1. Red-winged Blackbirds occur all over North America. Take a closer look at how and why males use their gorgeous plumage to defend marshy territories.

2. Sometimes your ears are all you need as a birder—especially when the glorious, haunting call of a Common Loon fills a misty summer night.

3. Shorebirds can flummox the keenest of bird watchers—but in this video we’ll walk you through the crowds assembled at a Louisiana beach, and help you recognize who’s who, by watching what they do.

4. At other times, it’s worthwhile to take a little extra time to appreciate a common species. Here’s a video introduction to the Mourning Dove, a widespread bird that may still surprise you.

5. If you’re new to birding or want to practice your skills, we’ve got lots of material to help you. Here’s one episode in our free series Inside Birding, about recognizing birds by their color pattern.

6. The Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library is the world’s largest archive of natural sounds—and it’s got a growing archive of video clips too. Check out these incredible clips of a dancing Magnificent Riflebird (be sure to watch to at least the 1:00 mark), a group of Harlequin Ducks, and a Mangrove Blue-Flycatcher from the Philippines.

7. The BBC has been making top-notch nature programs for decades. A recent, amazing clip takes you into the air by putting tiny cameras onto the backs of falconers’ birds.

8. Listen to the Superb Lyrebird impersonate kookaburras and camera shutters in one of the BBC’s best-loved clips.

9. Go under the arctic waters as eiders pry mussels from the bottom, then rocket to the surface again.

10. Explore the anatomy of a kingfisher’s dive—from hover to splash to grab. Featuring incredible slow-motion footage.

You can watch many other BBC clips on their website (though not all are available for U.S. viewers). Even apart from the gorgeous footage, watching legendary host Sir David Attenborough appear in the wildest of locations is a never-ending source of enjoyment. Here’s a close encounter with a Wandering Alabatross to start with. Watch Sir David politely fend off an advancing adult without even stopping his sentence.

As with our books list, we had only a limited number of slots to work with—so let us know in comments or on Facebook what your own favorite video moments are.

New! 500+ bird songs free to play on mobile devices

admin — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:02:26 +0000

Our All About Birds website lets you listen to the songs and calls of more than 500 bird species, for free. And starting this week you can even listen to them on mobile devices such as iPhone, Android, iPad, and iPod Touch.

The new feature is not an app—you access the songs through your phone’s Internet browser. Just browse to one of our species pages, or start here: www.allaboutbirds.org. Then click on the sound files and listen as songs (or chirps, rattles, drums, croaks, or scolds) fill the air. UPDATE: Thanks to reader Mikael Behrens, who reminded us to mention that birders should not overuse playback in the field. David Sibley has some great advice that we encourage you to read.

Our All About Birds web team recently finished up a big, behind-the-scenes upgrade to our database. We’re eagerly anticipating new upgrades to our award-winning website—and this is one of the first steps. We debuted the feature to our Facebook followers yesterday and they really enjoyed having the sounds wherever they were, over wireless or a cellular network.

We did get a few technical questions though, such as Does the site work on Palm or Blackberry? Why don’t we have a standalone app? and Do mobile users need to access the site with a special web address? Our director of Web communications, Alex Chang, posted a response to Facebook and we thought we’d repeat it here for anyone who has similar questions:

Thank you for your interest in the AAB mobile experience. Because the majority of our users get to our site on laptops and desktops, we have only so many resources available for developing for mobile devices. But keep lobbying for it!

We don’t have enough staff right now to develop All About Birds apps for iPhone and Android. So instead, we’re working to make our website friendly to smartphone web browsers.

As a first step, we made sounds and videos playable on both Android and Apple iOS devices. You don’t have to do anything special, just go to http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide and use the site as normal.

We hope to develop a version of the site that’s fully optimized for mobile phones in the future. Although we don’t explicitly support WebOS (Palm), and Blackberry, as long as your web browser supports web standards and has Flash player installed, you will be able to access the website, listen to the sounds, and view the videos.

We made a special effort to make the media playable on Apple iOS devices since there are a lot of iPhone users out there (and at the Lab) and Apple refuses to put Flash on their phone. We hope you enjoy all the sounds, etc., on our site!

If you have more questions about how to get the most out of All About Birds, please drop us a line in comments! Thanks for using our site.

(Image: One of my favorite birds in the world, the Black-backed Woodpecker, now calling and drumming on my iPhone)