SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
And finally, today, a little bit of nature to ease you into your evening.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
DETROW: That chirping you're hearing right now is the western meadowlark. It's one of the sounds that made the Macauley Library's list of best audio recordings of 2025. The library is an online collection featuring more than 2 million recordings of birds and other animals. It's put together by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Matthew Medler is an associate editor of All About Birds. That is a guide that is put together by the Cornell Lab. And he joins us now to guide us through all of these sounds. Welcome.
MATTHEW MEDLER: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
DETROW: Tell us about this list. Tell us about this library as a whole and why it's so important to you to collect all these sounds.
MEDLER: Yeah, so the list is really a celebration of the beauty and diversity of bird sounds from around the world. And the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the premier scientific archive of bird sounds. So it now houses over 2.5 million recordings from every continent on Earth. This can be used as a resource for scientists who want to investigate details of bird sound, bird taxonomy and really any question that they can think of related to bird sounds. At the same time, it also serves as an educational resource for people that are interested in learning more about the birds, you know, near their homes, or they like to go bird watching.
DETROW: So this audio is coming in from experts, from amateur volunteers, from all sorts of sources. And this is the best of the best of the sounds collected in the last year?
MEDLER: Correct. Yeah, so anybody with an Internet connection can contribute their recordings to the Macaulay Library. And the way to do that is through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird app, which is an app that you can download for free. And then you submit your bird observations, and then once you've said what birds you've seen on a given outing, then you can just drag and drop your recordings onto your checklist, and the recordings go into eBird and the Macaulay library.
DETROW: Let's listen to a few of them and talk about them.
MEDLER: Sounds great.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
DETROW: So this was in the capturing natural moments category. Can you tell us about it?
MEDLER: Yeah, this is a really special recording. This is a young banded wren. So it's kind of like a recording of a young child that's just learning how to talk. So this is not what an adult banded wren sounds like at all. We have another recording, and perhaps we can listen to the adult example as well just as a comparison.
DETROW: OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
DETROW: Oh, that's so different.
MEDLER: Yeah. Like, if you didn't know that they were the same species, you'd have no idea that that was the same bird...
DETROW: Yeah.
MEDLER: ...Or the same species, I should say. So the recordist in this case, Roselvy Juarez - she knows this bird very well, and she realized when she was out on the field that she was hearing something special - she was hearing this young bird - because, even though there are, you know, billions of baby birds born every year, it's pretty rare to actually hear them singing in the wild, and it's even rarer to make such a nice recording. You know, the adult is really crisp and has this short, discreet song, these really rapid, you know, trills. And the young bird just kind of sounds a little bit like a jazz musician, kind of just, you know, rambling along, kind of no clear riffs at all, just kind of - just improvising.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
DETROW: Let's go to another bird that is one of my physical favorite birds to look at. I just think they're so interesting looking - sandhill crane. So let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
DETROW: What category did you put that sandhill crane in and why?
MEDLER: We put this into the beautiful sounds category. It just gives me goose bumps when I hear that sound. As you said, it's a beautiful bird. It's this big, elegant, you know, graceful bird. And these - they do these bugling sounds that can be heard for over 2 miles away. So, you know, sometimes when you're in the field, you'll hear that sound well before you actually see the bird. And it just - yeah, it just kind of makes the hair stand on end when you hear it. It's just this incredible loud bugle.
DETROW: Yeah. I mentioned before the virtuosic singer category. Let's listen to one from that category. This is the New Zealand bellbird.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
DETROW: I mean, such range.
MEDLER: Yeah, it's incredible, just that - going from, you know, high to low, just in a split second and just kind of that beautiful kind of tinkling sound, the tinkling quality to the notes. It's only found in New Zealand. And it's one of the more common native birds there, so when you're in the forest sometimes, these - several birds will vocalize all at the same time. And if you're in the forest, you can almost be surrounded by these beautiful notes, and it's just this magical experience.
DETROW: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CHIRPING)
DETROW: And then that one note just, like, blasts at, like, a different level than all the other ones.
MEDLER: Exactly.
DETROW: Wondering if you have any tips for somebody who is maybe already trying or wants to try recording some of these bird calls that, you know, maybe doesn't want to spend a ton on high-level recording equipment - but what are some tips and tricks to get that good sound, to capture it well?
MEDLER: So there are three things that really pay off no matter what sort of gear you have, you know, starting - if you want to start with a smartphone. One is, you know, learning to be quiet, so don't make any sounds - moving, you know, walking on leaves or on a gravel path. That sort of thing makes sound that we might not be aware of until we start to do sound recording.
The next thing is really kind of understanding the behavior of the birds or mammals that you're trying to record. So don't just rush after a bird because if you do that, you're probably going to scare it away. So it's better to just kind of quiet down, observe the bird a little bit, get a feel for where the bird is singing from, how it's moving around a territory, and then picking a spot where you think that you can make a recording but not disturb the bird from its natural behavior.
And then another thing is just having patience. Sometimes the birds - you know, they take a little time in between songs, or they might fly away to a different perch and then come back. So being patient and then finally being persistent.
DETROW: That's Matthew Medler, associate editor of the All About Birds guide at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Thank you so much.
MEDLER: Thank you, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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