Bird Songs

by Chris Parrish

This web site displays a number of digital recordings of North American bird songs. It was inspired by Donald Kroodsma's fine book, "The Singing Life of Birds." He finishes his book with an exhortation: "Anyone can do this kind of stuff. And anyone should." So I turned to my laptop and typed out the html for the page with the American Crow, and this site went up that same afternoon. Why the American Crow? ... because that was one of my first recordings that turned out pretty well!

All of the recordings included here were made by me, most of them with a Nagra ARES-BB+ digital recorder, Sennheiser MKH70 microphone, and Amadeus Pro audio editing software. The remaining few examples were made with the same recorder, a Telinga parabola, and a Sennheiser MKH20 microphone on loan from my ornithologist friend, David Haskell. The original recordings were sampled at 24 bits and 44.1 kHz. The files on display here have been compressed to 128 kbps mp3's for web compatibility. The graphics are screen captures by Grab (Apple system software) of illustrations generated from these recordings by Amadeus Pro running on a Macintosh laptop.

Note that the locality coordinates on these pages are in a format which can be interpreted by Google Earth. First, you must have Google Earth running on your computer. Then, to visit a locality, say, the May Lake trailhead in Yosemite National Park, select its coordinates, N37°49'57.83" W119°29'27.21", and paste them into the Search window of Google Earth. Select Fly To and click on Google Earth's Search icon or hit Return to fly to that locality. Most of the recording sites mentioned in these pages are listed in this table of recording localities. Thank you, Google Earth! You are amazing!

More of my recordings, and those of a great community of neotropical bird song enthusiasts, can be heard on www.xeno-canto.org.

I am grateful to Greg Budney of the Macaulay Library for helpful advice at an early stage of this project, and to Bob Planque and Willem-Pier Vellinga of xeno-canto for a long series of intercontinental emails sharing their tremendous enthusiasm for bird song recordings.

Alas, the great springtime wave of bird song is abating in the northern hemisphere, so I anticipate only modest additions to the present contents ... until next Spring!

Chris, Summer 2007

Anatidae