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.)

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.)

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  Laughing Kookaburras are bold birds with fantastical calls (listen below).

  

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  The Blue-winged Kookaburra looks like a slightly insane Laughing Kookaburra.

  

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  This Boyd's Forest Dragon is about the gentlest-looking dragon you'll ever see.

  

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.)

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  Endemic #1: Macleay's Honeyeater (by JJ Harrison)

  

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  Endemic #2: Victoria's Riflebird (female; by Kelson via Wikipedia)

  

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  Endemic #2: Victoria's Riflebird (male; by Kelson via Wikipedia)

  

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  Endemic #3: Pied Monarch by Tim Lenz

  

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  Endemic #4: Golden Bowerbird by David Cook via Creative Commons

  

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  Endemic #5: Tooth-billed Bowerbird painting by Richard Bowdler Sharpe ca. 1900

  

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  Endemic #6: Fernwren by Tim Lenz

  

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.)

It isn’t always enough just to watch birds—bird watchers are always asking questions about them too. WHY is that cardinal attacking my car? WHY don’t birds fall off branches as they sleep? WHY is bird poop white? Each year, thousands of bird watchers call and write to us with questions such as these. Now, we’ve packed more than 100 of those answers—ranging from common to off-the-wall—into the new Cornell Lab Bird Q&A app from Tipitap. It’s available from iTunes for $2.99—and on sale today only for just $1.99.

The Bird Q&A app is a fun way to learn more about why birds do what they do. Although it is not a field guide, it includes hundreds of beautiful bird photos accompanied by sounds from the Cornell Lab’s Macaulay Library archive—the largest collection of bird sounds in the world. You can explore question categories such as “Fact or Fiction,”  “Nests & Eggs,” “Bird Songs,” and “Feathers & Flight.”

After absorbing some of this bird lore, test yourself with built-in quizzes in three categories: novice, skilled, and hotshot. Choose quizzes on bird facts, bird identification, or recognizing birds by their songs and calls. It’s never been easier to learn about a subject that is so fascinating.

The informative, occasionally quirky content is written by bird expert and author Laura Erickson, and is a perfect complement to The Bird Watching Answer Book, from Storey Publishing.

A portion of the proceeds goes into bird conservation programs at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology—so our bird experts can keep doing their research to come up with the answers to a never-ending stream of questions about birds.

Jon Erickson is still roaming Mauritius with his microphone, making recordings of the tropic island’s unusual species. That’s him above, installing a microphone to record sounds at a Mauritius Kestrel nest in January. Here’s his story of the day’s work, including an alarming surprise encounter:

I’d spent so much time out among the seabirds of Round Island that the Mauritius Kestrel breeding season was nearly over, but I still hoped to find a juvenile to record. The kestrel nest I had visited early on had finished, but a Ph.D. student named Sam was studying another nest at Ferney Valley, on the east side of the island. She agreed to let me come along.

The sugarcane fields at Ferney blended into the surrounding hillside in a nearly blinding shade of green. Small rivers crossed the path as I made my way up into the hillside toward the kestrel nest. Mauritius fruit bats the size of crows flew above me, and the air was perfumed with flowers and a faint smell of molasses from the sugarcane.

The nest box sat on a branch about 15 feet high in a large tree beside a small river. A picturesque waterfall just 40 feet away would normally be so noisy that it would ruin my recordings, but fortunately I was prepared. I’d brought with me a pair of microphones that, when used together and placed close to the nest box, can capture a very realistic audio picture without the loud white noise of the waterfall.

Just then Sam arrived and kindly offered to haul my equipment up into the tree and while she checked on the young kestrels in the box. She scaled the tree effortlessly and peered into the box to find that one nestling had fledged but the other was still inside—possibly the last non-fledged kestrel chick on the island.

I tested my levels and found that the microphones in the tree were working brilliantly.  But after a while with no visits, I started to wonder if my presence was keeping the adults away. I moved my gear to a hidden spot a bit farther away and, as it turned out, missed a very interesting development that I would learn about later.

As I sat down to record again I spotted a kestrel returning to the tree. Its green and brown leg bands marked it as the newly fledged juvenile.  Next, the adult male returned to the tree with a fresh kill, and I was happy to hear the juvenile’s chattering coming in clearly over the microphones. In time, the female adult arrived and the three began milling about from branch to branch and occasionally calling. Neither adult approached the nest box.

Suddenly a very loud squawking came over my headphones. I had turned up the gain to catch the adults as they moved away from the microphones by the nest box, and now something was calling from inside the box and nearly deafening me.

Besides the volume, the call made me uneasy. I thought I recognized it, but not as a kestrel. I shrugged it off and continued recording the adults, with no further calls coming from inside the box. Still the adults did not approach the nest box. Maybe the bulky microphones were scaring them off, I thought, and decided to take them down. I would not get recordings of adults feeding the chick in the box, but it was at a critical moment in its development and needed to eat.

I scaled the tree using wooden handholds the researchers had placed. I unstrapped the microphones and peeked into the nest box.  It took my brain several seconds to comprehend what I was seeing.  There was a large mass of white feathers—a White-tailed Tropicbird was inside the kestrel nest—and its yellow beak was grabbing hold of the chick! The bird must have sneaked into the nest while I was moving my equipment, and that had been the shrill call I had heard earlier.

Hear the tropicbird screeching from inside the nest box:

Before I could free the kestrel chick, the tropicbird tumbled out of the nest with the chick in its beak. They fell about five feet before the white-tail let go and dropped the kestrel onto the rocks below. Stunned at what I had just seen, I climbed down and examined the bird. It lay on its back on the rocks with one of its wings resting in an awkward position.

Not sure how to proceed, I called Sam on my cell phone. She had moved on to another study site and was out of range, so I tried Rich, another member of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation kestrel team, who told me to take the nestling to the M.W.F. station on the other side of the island.

I carefully placed the poor bird into a cloth bag, hiked out of the valley and drove to Rich. The bird was okay, but had suffered a damaged wing.  It was taken immediately to the M.W.F. aviary to recover. (Here’s a picture of the bird safe in its cloth bag.)

Later, Sam told me that it is not uncommon for tropicbirds to remove kestrel chicks from nests in order to take over the nest box. This particular nest box had a history of White-tailed Tropicbird encounters, she said.  On more than one occasion, tropicbirds have been found inside of kestrel nests with a dead chick lying on the ground below it—but, to Sam’s knowledge, no one had ever witnessed the event.

Fortunately for this chick, I had. As of late February, the chick was doing fine at the aviary, and the team was considering releasing the bird back into the wild.

And on top of it all, I had collected a unique and unusual set of recordings.

(Images and recording by Jon Erickson.)

Here’s part two of Jon Erickson’s report from his holiday visit to Round Island, 14 miles off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean:

Evenings on Round Island are quite special. The island is home to a large colony of Wedge-tailed Shearwaters that dig burrows into the loose soil to lay their eggs. After the sun goes down, the wedge-tails begin returning to the island in massive numbers and soon afterward they begin making their wonderful call.

Hear the “kazoo opera” sound of the Wedge-tailed Shearwater:

The best way to describe the call is to imagine a group of thousands of birds with kazoos taped to their bills. It is quite comical and I spent a good part of my first night laughing to myself in my tent. In fact, I got very little sleep for my entire two weeks on the island because of these birds. Not because they woke me up, but because I was recording the sounds from inside my tent with a long cable and a pair of stereo microphones outside.

The shearwaters are not as graceful as the petrels I wrote about last week. When scared, they take to the air no matter what’s in front of them, be it a wall, a tree, or, on one unfortunate evening, my face. There were so many around that they continually fell into the footing holes I was digging for the storage shed. Eventually I was forced to cover the holes, even while I was working nearby.

Watch me helping a shearwater back out of the hole:

I also got to help warden Tom with his weekly searches for keel-scaled boas, large nocturnal snakes found only on Round Island. This meant hiking in the dark across a rocky island shaped like a volcano sliced vertically down the middle. One search took us down into the central crater. With waves crashing below us and a full moon above us, we walked six feet apart looking for snakes and any other reptiles. Just at the end of our search, in the farthest corner of the quadrant, we found a large boa and Tom grabbed it. He handed it to me to hold as he measured and tagged it. The snake was beautiful as it wrapped its four-foot body around my arm. After searching for its tag we realized that this snake had never been captured before.  We were probably the first people to ever see this particular individual.

My two weeks on Round Island passed quickly catching petrels, searching for boas, giving water to giant tortoises (Aldabran tortoises have been brought here as on Ile aux Aigrettes), and building the storage shed. I accrued a massive collection of recordings: Herald Petrels (listen to it here), Wedge-tailed Shearwaters, Red-tailed and White-tailed tropicbirds, and even an accidental Black-winged Petrel, normally seen in the Pacific rather than the Indian Ocean. I had also had the chance to become intimate with some very rare and special species.

By the time I was waiting nervously on the landing rock for our return boat trip, I was already getting excited for my scheduled return to the island in mid-January. I hope to amass even more recordings and look forward to falling asleep to the birds with kazoos taped to their bills.

(Image: Jon Erickson takes time out from the Wedge-tailed Shearwaters to point his microphone at a nesting White-tailed Tropicbird)

We’ve been hearing reports from all over lately about newly returning migrants: a Pine Warbler heard over New York City late one night; Louisiana Waterthrushes in Philadelphia, a Prothonotary Warbler seen over a North Florida beach. Here’s another post about listening to migration,  from Lab researchers Mike Powers and Lewis Grove. Here’s Mike:

Spring migration means early mornings and great bird watching. But we think some of the most exciting birding happens all night long, as migrants fly northward over our heads. By now, even here in Ithaca, New York, we’re hearing Hermit Thrushes, Brown Creepers, and White-throated Sparrows passing over Sapsucker Woods. You can step outside and hear night migrants, too – but what exactly should you listen for?

Even the most gifted songsters save their breath while they’re flying. Flight calls are simple and very short: only about a half-second long at most. But they still vary in length, pitch, and quality. Some rise in pitch; others descend. Some are buzzy and others are pure-toned. By noting these characteristics you can determine which species are flying overhead. All you need is to be able to hear enough detail among the tsips, tseeps, zeeps, and sips.

One way to get a better listen is to point a microphone at the night sky and record the calls, then slow them down and analyze them using special software. We use a program developed here at the Lab called Raven (a free version is available for anyone to download.) What we get is a graph called a spectrogram that lets us “see” the sound.

In addition to letting us get much-needed sleep, there is a practical reason for this: We can see far more detail in a spectrogram than our ears could ever detect on their own. In the spectrogram at the top of the post, what you’re seeing in yellow-green are flight calls recorded over about six seconds one fall night. It’s easy to see eight calls – and if you turn your sound up and click play, you’ll hear them as a marker moves across the graph.

You can pick out details on the graph that you might not hear: higher lines on the graph correspond to higher-pitched sounds, and brighter colors mean louder sounds. Taking just the first two calls as an example, you can see how the first one is more squiggly and S-shaped than the second one, which is more comma-shaped. And in fact, those are two different birds: a Veery and a Swainson’s Thrush that were flying over the microphone at the same time.

Now look at the rest of the graph: you can tell that the Veery called five more times and the Swainson’s Thrush called one more time. (There’s also an extremely faint call at about the 2-second mark that’s probably a Gray-cheeked Thrush. It’s hard to hear, but you can see the faint blue trace on the graph.)

The display allows us to  measure the sound’s length, frequency, and even loudness (power), as well as more subtle characteristics like modulation and intonation.  Measure the call along the horizontal axis to determine the duration, keeping in mind they are typically measured in milliseconds (one millisecond is equal to 1/1000 of a second).

The vertical axis tells you the frequency or pitch, measured in kilohertz (kHz).  The highest calls come from the small-bodied warblers and sparrows, and are typically between 6 and 10 kHz.  The lowest calls, given by the larger-bodied cuckoos and thrushes, are found between 1 and 6 kHz.  The power of the sound, measured in decibels (dB), can be determined by the intensity on the screen.

Taking all of that into account, we can now say that the Veery and Swainson’s Thrush calls are both about 150ms long (much less than a half-second, as it turns out).  The Veery call is slightly higher pitched, at 2.8 to 3.4 kHz, while the Swainson’s call lies between 2.3 and 3.2 kHz. The strongest parts of each call measure 90 dB.  These are measurements we never could have hoped to gather with just our ears.

Read more about spectrograms – and listen to examples – at the Lab’s Bioacoustics Research Program website.

We hope you’ll listen to the night skies in your area for the flood of migrant songbirds returning to their breeding grounds. Sometime in the coming week would be a great time to give it a try. Then return here to tell us about your outdoor adventures. Even if you can’t identify the calls, have you heard any birds flying over your house at night?

(This post was written by Lewis Grove and Mike Powers. The recording is from September 20, 2007, Airglow Observatory, Jennerstown, Pennsylvania, courtesy of Powdermill Avian Research Center.)