About Us

We’ve been birding, to one extent or another, for somewhere in the general area of 30 years. It’s only been in the last 20 years or so, however, that we’ve been avid birders. By that we mean attending birding outings, leading some of them, attending birding events, even putting on a few, and being active members in the local birding crowd.

When it comes to birdsong, we slipped into that particular spiraling vortex about 10 years ago. Three events occurred that forced the ground from underneath our feet, leading to our continued fall down the birdsong rabbit hole.

The Singing Life of Birds

In 2005, Dr. Don Kroodsma wrote The Singing Life of Birds – the Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong. The accolades for this book were numerous. The Journal of Field Ornithology said, “There is only one word to describe this book — superb!”

We think that was an understatement. This book should have come with some sort of warning label. Little did we know at the time, that it would lead to years of listening to birdsong, learning birdsong, even recording and dissecting birdsong.

We had the opportunity to meet Dr. Kroodsma several years ago. The conversation went basically like this:

“It is so good to meet you, Don, but we have a bone to pick with you.”

“Oh? What did I do?”

“We have this short little trail out back of our house. It’s just a short little loop that winds through some pines, into a gas company easement opening, and back out through some majestic oak trees. We can cover the whole trail in no more than 10 minutes.”

We went on, “We bought your book and not only read it, but studied it intensively. It’s really a great book.”

“Thank you,” he said, “I’m glad you liked it.”

“That’s the problem, Don. After reading your book, it now takes 2-1/2 hours, minimum, to walk that 10-minute trail. We have to stop and listen to every little chirp, every song, every tiny note of every song from every bird; we can’t stop listening!”

You get the idea. Very quickly, we went from hearing the birds singing on our little 10 acres in south-central Indiana to really listening, even studying every individual bird. We got to the point that we could identify individual birds of a given species just by the variations in their songs.

We never realized how enlightening it was at the bottom of that rabbit hole. And, we didn’t even realize that we hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom. We had farther to fall.

AOU Conference – Estes Park, Colorado

A couple of years after meeting Dr. Kroodsma, we attended the American Ornithologist’s Union (now the AOS – American Ornithology Society) annual conference in Estes Park, Colorado with a couple of Indiana University biology professors from our local birding community.

One of the sessions we attended was presented by a graduate student from a Tennessee university that was using balloons to float digital recording devices over fields to record birds singing. Those recordings were then compared to the tally of birds that a ground crew walking the same area had documented. The two lists were fairly close with some obvious observer bias on the part of the ground crew.

The down side to using balloons is you can’t make them go where they may need to go. And, you can’t use them in the woods. But, that didn’t matter to us. What mattered to us was the quality of the recordings they were able to get with what amounted to handheld digital voice recorders.

The seed was planted and by the time we got back to Indiana a few days later, it had sprouted.

Audacity

Recordings are fine, but how good are they? How can you edit them, delete parts you don’t want, get rid of the extraneous background noise? And, most importantly, how much is the software to do all this going to cost?

Back to The Singing Life of Birds. The software that Dr. Kroodsma used in the book is known as Raven Pro. It’s expensive and we’ll leave it at that. But, there is also a free version called Raven Lite.

We gave it a try. We weren’t happy. It had a problem that we couldn’t seem to get around. If the recording was too long (e.g., the file was too big), more than about 6 or 8 minutes in length, the software would randomly, it seemed, truncate portions of the recording. That’s no good.

Are there any other alternatives out in the cyberworld?

Yes. Audacity–and, like Raven Lite, it’s FREE!

We tried it. No truncated files! We downloaded recordings up to two hours long and nothing was missing. It was great! And we continue to use that same software (they’ve had a few updates since then) today with the same results.

Now, we were in business.

(Update: Raven Lite came out with an update a few years ago that seems to have fixed the problem that we were having. We haven’t switched back to it for the simple reasons that Audacity continues to do what we want it to do and it’s still FREE! So is Raven Lite.)

Fast forward

Today, we have the website you’re looking at, hours and hours of recordings of some 90 species of birds, several years of training numerous professional bird survey technicians, our Birdsong 101 Course to learn birdsong, and a burning desire to help the general birding public down the rabbit hole of birdsong.

We’ll act as a parachute so you float gracefully, instead of falling head first like we did, to your landing at the bottom. That is, if you ever land.

We still haven’t.

Enjoy.