These Bird Songs Are Disappearing From Nature, So This Artist Captured Them In A Sound Installation

March 12, 2019

Hadley Green

The song of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a bird native to Hawaii, is a delicate, flute-like melody. If you listen closely, you can hear a short succession of chirps gliding playfully from lower to higher tones. The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was last seen on the island of Kaua’i in 1987. Its call, now archived as a field recording, is no longer heard in the wild. Yet this weekend, the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō and 11 other critically endangered or extinct creatures will be heard in "Requiem," a sound installation at the Boston Nature Center in Mattapan.

It combines the noises of birds and frogs, whose sounds have been sourced from field recordings at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and The Amphibian Foundation in Atlanta. "Requiem," which has traveled from Maine to Boston and back again, is a purely auditory experience.

Staged in a large, empty room with four speakers, guests will hear the sounds of 10 birds and two frogs continuously looping on an audio file. The recording begins with one or two animals noises, and slowly builds to a mild cacophony of tweets, chirps, whoops and wood-peckings. Throughout the piece, familiar noises fade out, and new calls are introduced, overlapping and punctuating each other without rhyme or reason.

“It’s entirely unpredictable,” says Steve Norton, the Maine-based artist and musician who created the installation. “Sometimes it gets very dense and then also falls silent." Norton says these pauses in the audio can surprise listeners. “There have been occasions where people have said, ‘Is it over?’ It’s theoretically never over. It could run until the power goes out.”

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8 species of birds have possibly gone extinct over past few decades

by Mongabay.com on 6 September 2018

A new study has found that eight species of birds are likely to have completely disappeared in the past couple of decades.

Researchers recommend that three species currently listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List be reclassified as extinct, while one be treated as extinct in the wild.

Four more bird species are dangerously close to extinction, if not already there, and should be re-classified as critically endangered (possibly extinct), researchers say.

Eight species of birds may have completely disappeared over the past couple of decades, a new study has found. Among these is the Spix’s macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii), a bird that inspired the character of Blu in the 2011 animated film Rio. Found only in Brazil, the bird has not seen in the wild since 2000.

Like the Spix’s macaw, several other bird species are believed to have become extinct in recent years. To pinpoint the ones that may already be gone, researchers from BirdLife International, a global partnership of conservation organizations focusing on bird conservation, looked at 51 species of birds with a “reasonable possibility of being extinct.” These are species that have either not been seen in the wild for more than 10 years despite exhaustive surveys, or species that have been seen within the last 10 years, but whose tiny population has suffered well-documented decline.

Stuart Butchart, BirdLife’s chief scientist, and his colleagues used a new statistical approach to arrive at the probability of extinction for the 51 species by combining information on the intensity of threats to the bird species, timing and reliability of records for the species, as well as timing and quality of efforts made to survey the species.

Based on their results, the researchers recommend that three species currently listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List be reclassified as extinct. These include the cryptic treehunter (Cichlocolaptes mazarbarnetti), last seen in the wild in 2007; the Alagoas foliage-gleaner (Philydor novaesi), not seen in the wild since 2011; and the poʻo-uli (Melamprosops phaeosoma), not seen since 2004. The Spix’s macaw, which has some individuals surviving in captivity, should be reclassified as extinct in the wild, the researchers say in the study published in Biological Conservation.

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The other Dodo: Extinct bird that used its wings as clubs

By Rory GallowayScience writer

2 December 2017

The extinct Dodo had a little-known relative on another island. This fascinating bird ultimately suffered the same fate as its iconic cousin, but we can reconstruct some of its biology thanks to the writings of a French explorer who studied it during his travels of the Indian Ocean.

In the middle of the 18th Century, at around the time the US was signing the declaration of independence, a large flightless bird quietly became extinct on an island in the Indian Ocean.

Today this bird is all but forgotten.

Early explorers to Rodrigues described a "Dodo" living on the tiny forested island. Males were grey-brown, and females sandy, both having strong legs and long, proud necks. But despite outward similarities to the iconic Mauritian bird, this wasn't in fact a Dodo, but the Rodrigues solitaire.

If you look up Rodrigues in satellite images, you can see a huge ring of submerged land around the central island, over 50% of the original dry land is thought to have been lost under the waves due to sea level rise and the island subsiding into the bedrock. That was the stage for the evolution of the huge bird, over millions of years.

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What DNA Says About the Extinction of America’s Most Common Bird ... and its possible resurrection

 NOV 16, 2017

On September 1, 1914, an old, trembling passenger pigeon named Martha died at Cincinnati Zoo. With her demise, her entire species slid into extinction. But in many ways, the species was already gone, for a solitary passenger pigeon is almost not a passenger pigeon at all. This is an animal that existed in gestalt. Its essence was in the flock.

Passenger pigeons were once the most abundant bird in North America, and quite possibly the world. At their peak, there were a few billion of them, traversing the continent in gargantuan, nomadic flocks that would blacken the sky for hours as they passed overhead. Simon Pokagon, a Potawatomi author and leader, described them as “the grandest waterfall of America” and their sound as that of “distant thunder” or “an army of horses laden with sleigh bells.”

And then, people started shooting them. They poisoned them, netted them, gassed them, hit them with sticks. In a matter of decades, the continent’s most common bird has been completely wiped out, down to the last individual. “It’s always astounded me how something could have that large a population and entirely disappear,” says Beth Shapiro from the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Why didn’t tiny populations survive somewhere in refugia? I mean, we are pretty good at murdering things, but how did we kill every one of them?”

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New Zealand Scientists Bring Extinct Birds Back Through 3D Scanning

by Clare Scott | Dec 2, 2015 | 

The extinction of a species is a heartbreaking thought, especially when you consider that some of our most beloved species, like monarch butterflies, frogs and toads, and bats are threatened, by disease or climate change, to the point that they may not be around for our grandchildren to see. Someday, they may only exist in museums, as remote to humans as moa and adzebills.

Say what now? Yes, moa and adzebills existed once, but the flightless birds have been extinct for thousands of years. You may never have heard of them (I certainly hadn’t) but a collaboration between scientists at Massey University, the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is bringing them back to life. Okay, not literally bringing them back to life – stop your Jurassic Park fantasies – but thanks to 3D scanning, the birds, along with several other of New Zealand’s extinct bird species, are being made more real than they have been for a long time.

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São Miguel Scops Owl Was Wiped out After Arrival of Humans in the Azores

June 27, 2013 — On São Miguel Island in the Azores, there used to exist a small, nocturnal bird of prey, related to the European scops owl, named Otus frutuosoi, which was very probably driven to extinction with the arrival of the first settlers in the 15th century. An international study, in which Spanish researchers participated, has for the first time identified fossils of this species endemic to the island.

On 28 August 2011 researchers Juan Carlos Rando, from the University of La Laguna (Tenerife), and Josep Antoni Alcover from the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Mallorca unearthed some small fossil bones buried not far below the ground of the Água de Pau cave (São Miguel Island, Azores, Portugal).

Two years later, an article published by the journal Zootaxa has revealed that the remains found belong to an extinct species of scops owl which has been given the name Otus frutuosoi in honour of the 16th-century Azorean historian Gaspar Frutuoso.

Carbon dating the fossils indicates that they are from 1,970 years ago. The hypothesis entertained by the researchers is that the arrival of human beings to the archipelago in the 15th century changed its ecosystem and caused the extinction of the species.

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Rare, Even Extinct Birds, Call on in Historic Recordings

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Molly Murray

On April 9, 1935, someone recorded the call of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker — a bird so rare it was just rediscovered in 2004. And so began the The Cornell Guide to Bird Sounds: Master Set for North America. The Ivory-billed recordings are the earliest in the collection. The complete recordings cost just under $50 and include the work of almost 300 recordists who caught the sounds of “wailing loons, warbling warblers, grunting grouse, and everything in between,” according to the folks at Cornell. There are 4,938 tracks that were chosen from almost 200,000 recordings in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library.

Bird calls are often used by experienced birds as they work in the field. Owls, for instance, can be difficult to see in the wild but they can be identified by call.

One of the interesting things about the collection is that while many of us know common bird calls, the recordings show a much more complicated vocalization system for some species.

This collection includes vocal “repertoires” for 735 species of North American birds. It also includes photographs.

“Listeners may be surprised to learn that even common backyard birds, such as the Black-capped Chickadee, Carolina Wren, and Tufted Titmouse, make a variety of sounds they may not have known about,” according to Cornell officials. “The Master Set also includes the voice of the now-extinct Bachman’s Warbler and the bubbling, popping courtship sounds of Gunnsion Sage-Grouse, an imperiled species.”

Too much information? There’s a beginner’s version called The Cornell Guide to Bird Sounds: Essential Set for North America. This includes the most common bird calls of 727 species that are found in the U.S. and Canada. It costs $12.99.

“These are living, breathing productions,” said Matt Young, the audio engineer on the project. “We’ll always be looking to update the collections as new and better recordings come into the archive.”

http://blogs.delawareonline.com/allgreentome/2013/05/30/rare-even-extinct-birds-call-on-in-historic-recordings/