Issue #5 - December 2007

44 Degrees in the Tropical North!

October and November, the southern spring season, has seen Sarah and I undertake a field trip to the tropical north of Australia.

Its been an amazing journey, we've covered nearly 8000km in 2 months, up through dry outback country to the gulf savanah of northern Queensland, and back down the east coast via rainforest and beaches.

It has been several years since we have done such an extensive field trip in our home country, and it has not only yielded some lovely recordings, but for the first time we have had a digital camera to really capture a nice collection of birdlife images. So expect some additions to our website photo galleries.

A Tropical Oasis

Without doubt the highlight of the trip was Boojamulla (Lawn Hill National Park), an oasis for wildlife in the far northwest of Queensland. Daytime temperatures were over 40 degrees, and many tourists had abandoned the area, but the birdlife was humming!

Lawn Hill Creek is a stream-fed river of clear emerald water, which flows out of a spectacular red rock gorge, its banks lined with a gallery forest of palms, pandanus, fig trees and tropical eucalypts. The birdlife here is wonderful, and it is a great place to encounter many species found only in the north, such as the lovely White-browed Robin and the rare Purple-crowned Fairy Wren.

Each morning I would set out from camp in the relative cool at 4am, and record the dawn birdsong for several hours. I am now listening back to those recordings, selecting the material for a full length album which we hope to make available for download in coming weeks.

Meanwhile Sarah would be out exploring a landscape that ranged from spinifex-covered ridgetops, to lush water cascades and riverine palm forest. She has made a selection of images for you to download as desktop backgrounds. She's included two extra images from our trip; predawn at a small billabong near Bourke, showing what may be an old aboriginal fish trap, and a view over Blackdown Tableland in SE Qld.
Lawn Hill 1024x768.zip
Lawn Hill 1680x1050.zip

And while you're viewing those images, here are two short recordings from our trip;
1. An Olive-backed Oriole giving a virtuoso display of imitating. You can hear him copying a Cockatiel, White-browed Woodswallow, Major Mitchell Cockatoo, Mulga Parrot, Cuckoo-Shrike and several raptor species.
2. An excerpt from a long recording made in the gulf savanah country near Hughendon. We hope to make this entire recording available soon, so here's a small preview... um, listen!

Friends and Colleagues

In addition to going bush, we've also had the opportunity to catch up with nature recording friends. Every two years the Australian Wildlife Sound Recording Group gathers for a workshop, and this year we met for a week of talks and social events, on a bush property near Mount Walsh National Park in SE Queensland. Many in the group are amateur nature recordists, and together we are an odd mob, but there is always a lot of knowledge, experience and good humour shared.

On this occasion we had the honour of hosting two guest speakers from the USA: Don Kroodsma is one of the world's leading researchers into birdsong and avian vocal behaviour, and Greg Budney is the head curator at the Macaulay Library of WIldlife Sound at Cornell University.

A Fresh Perspective on Listening to Birdsong

For me, meeting with Don Kroodsma was very rewarding. As professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and having spent the last 40 years researching birdsong in the field, he has some very interesting things to say about how and why birds sing.

Don has recently published a book entitled 'The Singing Life of Birds', and I took the opportunity of reading it around camp at Lawn Hill (a good use of shady trees on hot afternoons).

At the gathering, I took Don aside for an hour and sat him down under another of those shady trees for a discussion about the science and aesthetics of listening to birdsong. As we talked, the birds sung around us. You can listen to what Don has to say about our feathered vocalists by downloading our discussion here (mp3 file, size 63Mb, right click & save to desktop).

Don's 'The Singing Life of Birds' is a fascinating and delightful read. It is poetic, thoughtful and full of insights. We bought a copy from the splendid Andrew Isles Natural History Bookshop in Melbourne (AU$50), but it is also available via Amazon.com. The book includes an audio CD to accompany the text, and I guarantee that after reading what Don has to say, you will never listen to a bird singing in quite the same way again.

A related book that I also read on the road, and can thoroughly recommend, is Don Stap's 'Birdsong'. It is writen from the perspective of a non-expert, as he accompanies some of the world's leading researchers (including Don Kroodsma) in their field work. It is as much a book about the people who study birdsong as it is about the birds themsleves. Giving a good overview of current knowledge of birdsong, it is an easy read, and makes a good prelude to delving into Don's work. (It is also available via Andrew Isles, or online sellers such as Amazon, where I see you can buy both books as a special deal)

Well, enough of promoting other people's work! On with preparing some more of our own...

Dial a Budgie!

If you drop into our Listening Earth Shop, you'll notice we've added a whole new category of products - Australian Nature Ringtones. In the past we resisted producing phone ringtones, despite requests, feeling that it would trivialise nature and turn our recordings into a gimick.

But birdsong actually makes an ideal phone ringtone, and is more pleasant than many of the ringtones one hears. So we've decided to have some fun with this, and we hope you will too. There are over two dozen ringtones for you to check out, included popular birdsong; Magpies, Kookaburras, Budgerigars, Whipbird, Butcherbird... and some lesser-known bird calls that are ideal for ringtones; Rosella, Crested Bellbird, Wedgebills, and the very cute call of a Red-capped Robin... Plus there is the original laconic Australian, the Raven, and for something totally different; a Koala.

We've priced them at a dollar each, and there are audio samples to have a listen to. So have some fun and, as they say, "amaze your friends".

We wish you, and your friends and family, all the best for the festive and holiday season.

Andrew & Sarah

PS: We arrived home from our journey just in time to see this year's brood of Welcome Swallows nesting under the eaves of our house. They flew the day after this family portrait was taken. Cute, aren't they?