Listening in on Birds

Collecting data on wild birds is crucial for their conservation. But it requires huge amounts of effort. One way to help streamline the process is with gizmos called autonomous recording units, or ARUs. For days or months, these recording devices eavesdrop on the environment around them, including the songs and calls of the local birds. Identifying the songs picked up on recordings can be almost as time-consuming as in-person field work, but new AI tools are quickly making it easier to analyze the audio.

BirdNote^®

Listening in on Birds

Written by Rebecca Heisman

This is BirdNote.

[Field recording of birdsong]

Collecting data on wild birds is crucial for their conservation. But it requires huge amounts of effort — researchers may spend many hours in the field, recording all the birds they see and hear or following the lives of specific individuals. This takes a lot of training, time, and money.

One way to help streamline the process is with gizmos called autonomous recording units, or ARUs. For days or months, these recording devices eavesdrop on the environment around them, including the songs and calls of the local birds.

Researcher: HMS Site 103, start time…now.

Recently, researchers tracked the lifespans of male Savannah Sparrows over six years using only recordings that captured individuals’ uniquely identifiable songs.

[Savannah Sparrow recording]

Identifying the songs picked up on recordings can be almost as time-consuming as in-person field work, but new AI tools are quickly making it easier to analyze the audio. This could open up new possibilities for expanding or replacing in-person bird surveys and monitoring secretive species.

You can even try a version of this at home with smartphone apps and specially made devices that record songs from your neighborhood. Who knows—maybe you’ll capture the call of a bird you’ve never observed in your area before.

For BirdNote, I’m Ariana Remmel.

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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Content Director: Jonese Franklin

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote October 2022/November 2024
Narrator: Ariana Remmel

ID# sound-31-2022-10-13 sound-31

Reference:
https://academic.oup.com/condor/article-abstract/124/2/duac003/6572065
https://academic.oup.com/condor/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/or…
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3…;