About the Author

Donald Kroodsma is a world-renowned authority on birdsong and professor emeritus of ornithology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. As a research scientist, he published widely on birdsong for more than 50 years, receiving life-time achievement awards from the American Ornithologists’ Union, the Wilson Ornithological Society, and the American Birding Association. More recently he has authored books that introduce the general public to birdsong: The Singing Life of Birds (winner of the John Burroughs Medal), The Backyard Birdsong Guides, Birdsong by the Seasons, and Listening to a Continent Sing: Birdsong by Bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He lives in Hatfield, Massachusetts. For more information, see DonaldKroodsma.com.

Enjoy the Sounds

Here is a gentle reminder that these sounds are for your personal enjoyment, not for commercial use. Listen until your heart’s content, and then some more! Should you wish to download all of the sound files, or a large number of them, please write to me, as I could send you a link to make your task easier: dekroodsma AT gmail DOT com.

Credits

A huge thank you to the photographers for sharing their hard-earned images: Wil Hershberger, Laure Wilson Neish, Marie Read, Robert Royse, Brian Small, and John Van de Graaff (see their respective websites). And an equally large thank you to the generous recordists for sharing their sounds: Mieko Aoki, Greg Budney, Greg Clark, Lang Elliott, Janet Grenzke, Wil Hershberger, Brad Jackson, Richard (Nels) Nelson, and Charlie Walcott. More thank you’s to Ethan Hazard-Watkins for web design, and for web development, David Kroodsma, Director of Research and Innovation at Global Fishing Watch.

Recording Birdsong

Soon you won't be content using the recordings that others supply for you, and you will want to make your own. With modern technology, that undertaking is increasingly simple, and increasingly inexpensive.

Rather than provide my own guidelines for recording, I refer you to the Macaulay Library. There you will find all you need to know about “Audio recording techniques” and “Audio recording gear,” including up-to-date information on microphones, digital audio recorders, accessories, and smartphones. As of 2019, there are three superb videos by Greg Budney, ex-curator of the Library, telling how to record: The Basics, With Parabola, and With Shotgun Microphone.

An exercise prepared for the Wilson Ornithological Society also provides information on how to record with smartphones.

My favorite recording system? I love parabolic microphones, because the highly directional parabolic reflector physically amplifies the sound from a distant source and concentrates it at the microphone, enabling much “cleaner” recordings of distant birds than a shotgun microphone can provide (but see advantages and disadvantages of various microphones on the Cornell website). I use a stereo Telinga microphone in the parabola, with good headphones over the ears (Sennheiser HD 25-1 II). For a recorder, I use a Sound Devices digital recorder (Model 722, an old one!), and my partner Janet Grenzke uses a Marantz PMD661. Our next recorder will probably be a MixPre from Sound Devices.

When I want long recordings, perhaps even overnight, and when I can set the microphone fairly close to the bird, I use a Marantz PMD661 recorder and an Audio Technica BP4027 stereo shotgun microphone. An external Voltaic battery (Model V44) supplies the power for a session that might last overnight. Sample recordings with this setup include the night-singing mockingbirds (e.g., ♫238, ♫516) and the sage thrasher who sang predictably during the daytime from just a few perches (e.g., ♫518, ♫528).

When I want to program a recorder to record only at certain times of the day over a week or more, all unattended, and when I will settle for a monaural recording, I use a Swift. Sample recordings include those from the night-singing sage thrasher (e.g., ♫519-527, ♫529-531), from the male northern cardinal singing at dawn (♫468-476), and from the female cardinal singing on the nest (♫60).

Additional Resources

1) Check out the exercise prepared for The Wilson Ornithological Society, on “Recording and analysis of bird vocalizations,” by Sylvia L. Halkin and Walter J. Berry, found here. It offers good “how to” information: How to get the best recordings you can with a smartphone, extensive and helpful notes on how to use Raven Lite for analyzing sounds, etc. Included is a useful glossary of terms (e.g., vocalization, frequency, amplitude, etc.), and a list of questions you might be able to answer about bird sounds, much like my Explore sections.

2) The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “All About Birdsong”, With audio and video; a game on bird identification included for 30 species.

3) On the internet you can find more bird sounds for your listening pleasure and study:

• Xeno-canto — “a website dedicated to sharing bird sounds from all over the world.”
• The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library — A rapidly growing archive of brief sound clips, as birders attach recordings to their eBird submissions. All recordings can be viewed as sonagrams.
• The Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at Ohio State University — “one of the oldest and most extensive . . . collections of recorded animal sounds . . . in the world . . .”
• The Bird Sounds Database at the Florida Museum of Natural History--sounds from over 3000 species of birds, all available online
• The British Library — An extensive, eclectic collection of earth sounds, including “Environment and Nature”
• Avian Vocal Behavior—Sound Visualizations. Sonagrams and accompanying sounds, illustrating Chapter 10 in the Handbook of Bird Biology, 3rd edition, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
• The companion website to my book Listening to a Continent Sing: Birdsong by Bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific, — a sample of bird sounds from North America, rich in explanation as to what you are hearing.

4) The following books or websites provide additional perspectives on birdsong:

• Constantine, M., and The Sound Approach. 2006. The Sound Approach to Birding. A guide to understanding bird sound. The Sound Approach, Poole, Dorset UK. Beautiful sonagrams, with sounds to accompany them.
• Elliott, Lang. The Music of Nature Celebrating the Voices of the Natural World. Elliott is a first-rate sound recordist, of birds, frogs, mammals, insects, and more, and author of many books on bird song (e.g., Common Birds and their Sounds; Music of the Birds—A Celebration of Bird Song).
• Kroodsma, D. 2005. The Singing Life of Birds. The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong. Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton-Mifflin Co. Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing.
• Kroodsma, D. 2008. The Backyard Birdsong Guide. Eastern and Central North America, and Western North America. San Francisco, California, Chronicle Books. Has sold nearly half a million copies; suitable for young of all ages, with an electronic module that plays the sounds for each of 75 species. More recently republished by Princeton University Press and the Cornell Lab Publishing Group.
• Kroodsma, D. 2009. Birdsong by the Seasons. A Year of Listening to Birds. Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt Co. Twenty-four chapters, exploring bird sounds from January through December.
• Kroodsma, D. 2016. Listening to a Continent Sing. Birdsong by Bicycle from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press. A 4500-mile bicycle ride from Virginia to Oregon, with my son David, listening to birds every inch of the way. On the companion website you can choose how to listen to the 381 recordings from this journey (by species, by location, or during the dawn chorus). Explanations on how to listen are provided for each recording, with background species noted.
• Low, T. 2014. Where song began. Australia’s Birds and how they Changed the World. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press. An exciting look at how birds sing so differently “down under.”
• Pieplow, N. 2017. Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, Massachusetts. “ . . . the most comprehensive reference to North American bird sounds ever produced . . .”
• Stap, D. 2005. Birdsong: A Natural History. New York City, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. A “creative mixture of reportage, storytelling, and research, Stap distills the complexities of the study of birdsong and unveils a remarkable discovery that sheds light on the mystery of mysteries . . .” (Amazon)
• Taylor, H. 2017. Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird. Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press. From the perspective of a musician.
• Young, J. 2012. What the Robin Knows. How Birds reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Boston, Massachusetts, Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt Co. “Here is the ancestral wisdom passed down from the Apache elder Stalking Wolf to the renowned tracker Tom Brown to Jon Young himself . . . the art of truly listening to the avian soundscape.”