Schoodic Notes

Bird Sounds of Acadia

Bird sound recordings

Above, a spectrogram of a Winter Wren singing in light rain.

The importance of contributing our bird sound recordings to the Macaulay Library, specifically, as opposed to creating our own private collection, is multi-fold. First, the Macaulay Library holds over 1,000,000 bird sound recordings from around the world (as of April 2021). More importantly, their mission “is to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts.”  Adding our recordings to the Macaulay Library makes our project bigger than itself alone, and longer lasting than staff or volunteers involved in our project, or this blog site, etc. In addition, uploading our recordings to the Macaulay Library serves as a “cloud” backup for our field recordings, and allows us to easily share them with others. It also allows us to share the spectrograms of the song or call which helps people to visualize sound, and is integral to analysis.

Look on the list of species below (arranged in alpha order by the species common name) and click on the link. It will take you to a landing page for the project’s recordings of that species.

Please note: The recordings are near-original copies, meaning they are minimally filtered, and trimmed and normalized according to best practices. Not always “pretty” but real.

Bird Sound Recordings


Above, recording at dawn from atop Schoodic Head.
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