Sound recording of bird voices has been a passion of mine for several decades now: my publication of MP3 sound collections for various neotropical countries was quite a pioneering breakthrough at that time, and at present some 26.000 of my recordings are available and playable on-line.

When working recently on a project to analyze birdsounds as a support for taxonomic decisions, I was quite satisfied with the wealth of sound recordings that had become available for the neotropics, but equally so I was surprised by the relative lack of sound recordings from Africa (and Asia to a lesser extent). I therefore decided to focus more on those regions, and in recent years I have visited Southern Africa several times with the primary aim to record as many as possible birdsounds. Such documentation of bird vocalizations definitely is important, as can be illustrated by e.g. the case of the Cape Parrot, where my recordings sure had an influence on BirdLife’s decision in 2017 to accept its full species status (and with the potential positive consequences for its protection).

With the availability of a few major sound collections of Southern Africa on one hand, and birdsound databases on internet (Xeno Canto, Macaulay) at the other hand, one may wonder if it is still useful to publish an additional sound collection. There are however still many reasons to do so. The internet sources are databases of unselected and unprocessed data, which may be overwhelming for anyone wanting to quickly pick the most representative recordings for a given species. The commercial sound collections at the other hand, typically hold a single example of the song for any bird species, and thus hardly illustrate the variation in voice.

I therefore hope that this new sound collection made with contemporary digital equipment (and mostly in stereo) is a welcome addition and will help birders and scientists in many ways.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the contributing recordists who made it possible to increase the comprehensiveness of this work. In alphabetic order they are Thijs Fijen, Hans Matheve, Faansie Peacock, Niall Perrins, Lynette Rudman and Derek Solomon.

My life-long birding friends Carl Beel, Luc Bekaert, Geert Claeys, Mark Reygaert and Mark Van Beirs accompanied me in the field on some of my birding trips to the region.

By posting my recordings on www.xeno-canto.org I received some much appreciated help with the identification of several unidentified recordings, in particular from James Bradley.

About the Author

Peter Boesman started birding in his home country Belgium in the 70s when he was twelve. He quickly started travelling all over Europe as a backpacker to learn more about the birds of the old continent. At home he made his knowledge at use by guiding nature walks, writing articles, and taking up responsibilities in the birder’s community. He was e.g. member of the Belgian Rarities Committee and co-author of the Avifauna of Flanders.

Parallel to his studies and interest for nature, Peter also studied music, and obtained the Belgian government medal for piano and a First prize at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent (presently called a Master in Music) before he was even eighteen years old ! Whether this early interest in music developed his abilities for working with bird sounds much later in his life will remain an open question.

In the eighties he started travelling beyond Europe: Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, USA and in 1988, he visited Venezuela, his first neotropical experience.

Only 2 years later, a managerial job opportunity offered by a Belgian multinational company made him move to Venezuela, which allowed him in his free time to get better acquainted with the local avifauna. It was also an opportunity to visit neighboring neotropical countries. Peter made soon several discoveries in Venezuela, and published articles about them (he was involved in the re-discovery of e.g. Grey-headed Warbler, Rustyflanked Crake, Great Antpitta, Plain-flanked Rail and he put some new birding places on the map such as Caño Colorado in E Venezuela, now a standard stop on many birding tours).

It is in this period that he also got interested in recording bird vocalizations. There was hardly anything available about Venezuelan birds and it became quickly obvious that knowing bird songs was essential to study birds in the neotropics. Armed with a directional microphone and a tape recorder he went off in the field. This was the start of the creation of his present birdsound collection. Soon he made many unique recordings, not only in Venezuela, but also in other neotropical countries, e.g. in Colombia in 1994 (a time in which hardly any foreign birder visited this country due to the country-wide guerrilla activities) he made the first recordings of a Screech Owl in the Santa Marta region, now described as a new taxon and new species, and in the same region he recorded the Foliagegleaner which was elevated to species rank some 15 years later as Santa Marta Foliagegleaner based on voice!

In 1995, while birding in Peru, an accident involving a Bushmaster snake had near-fatal consequences. Peter miraculously survived, but lost his complete right leg. Less than a year later however, he made his first attempts to get back in the field, he continued recording bird vocalizations and did several bird-censuses of areas in NW Venezuela.

Later he moved to the USA for his job, where he published a pioneering CD-ROM ‘Birds of Venezuela, photographs, sounds and distributions’ (1999). From his new base, it didn’t take him long to venture into the northern side of the neotropics: Mexico. Even when the job called him back to Belgium, he continued travelling to Mexico, and after some years he had not only visited most corners of this magnificent country, but gathered a vast collection of bird song recordings. In the same way, he could not resist the tempting treasure of birds in Brazil.

At the end of 2005, he again came up with a pioneering idea to publish a large set of bird song recordings on a single MP3 CD per country, for Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, the start of his famous set of ‘MP3 sound collections’.

Back in Belgium, he decided it was time also for this region to have some fresh new recordings (surprisingly, very little had been published of his home country in recent decades!). He acquired the latest digital recording equipment and visited all corners of Belgium and the Netherlands. A few years later, Peter could again deliver, this time an incredible MP3 multimedia fieldguide of the birds of Belgium and the Netherlands. The novelty not only being the excellent sound recordings, but also the unique combination of sound, pictures, distribution maps and text in a format useable on both PC/Mac and MP3 players. His latest achievements in the neotropics rightly deserve the term ‘monumental’. In 2009, for the first time the vocalizations of Peru were documented in a single work (containing no less than 3350 recordings of some 1530 Peruvian bird species). In a similar way he documented the birds of Costa Rica. Then came the update for Brazil and Venezuela (in which no less than 4600 resp. 4200 recordings are included), and his last work in the Neotropics treated Colombia with a staggering 5575 recordings of 1644 species. An amazing coverage of the Neotropics !

Besides publishing birdsound collections, Peter is also transferring his experience in other ways, and since the ‘Handbook of the Birds of the World’ has gone on-line, Peter is an editor for HBW Alive, focusing on the voice section for all bird species. He also wrote Ornithological Notes about vocal differences for some 400 (!) species to support the renewed HBW/Birdlife taxonomy.

Through the years, Peter has accumulated a bird sound collection of some 28000 recordings, almost all of which are now available on the internet. He has published vocalizations of more bird species than anyone in the world by now, despite his serious physical handicap! He hopes to continue doing so in the future, with more focus however on the Old World.

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Southern Africa Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

by the author, Christoph Zöckler

Siberia is still surrounded by a veil of mystery. The vast area is still little explored in terms of birds, yet home of rare waders and thrushes, vagrant warblers and the dazzling Siberian Rubythroat. As hardly any recordings have been made available to the public, this package aims to illustrate the sounds of most species in Arctic Siberia.

Over a period of seven years, between 1995 and 2002, I was very fortunate to visit some of the most remote places in the Palaearctic: Northern Siberia and took sound recordings of Arctic birds. For many years the region was inaccessible and still today it creates huge logistic challenges to visit most of the areas. In the harsh Arctic environment the birds are only present from late May to early August and even then severe weather conditions often obstruct the recording. Many of the introduced species‘ vocalisations are only known from the non-breeding areas, while their songs and breeding display is hardly known.

The following selection of bird sounds was recorded from Taimyr (1995) in the West, Yakutia (1996-1999) to Chukotka (2000, 2002) in the East of Siberia. In total this package covers 97 species, almost all typical species of the region and 196 different recordings and supplemented by four soundscapes of typical North Siberian landscapes. e prime habitats include typical and mountain tundra, coastal areas as well as the forest tundra and the northern taiga. A few recordings have been included from the more southern Central taiga. Sound recordings contain dominantly the breeding display sounds and alarm calls and sometimes chicks during the brood rearing period. For many, but not all species there are several different sound recordings capturing different regional types or other variations in the display songs and calls, as well as other calls from the breeding area. Display and alarm calls sometimes match or have elements of the calls we can hear on migration outside Siberia.

Many recordings have been made under difficult weather conditions. But improving weather favors mosquitoes immediately, and there is only a short period ideal for sound recording, lasting in some areas of Siberia less than a day. Many tracks therefore inevitably have the buzzing sound of mosquitoes not only in the background.

The recordings were made with a Sennheiser ME 80 microphone and a Sony Professional tape recorder and since 1997 also a Sony TCD-D8 DAT recorder. For sound editing, Sound Forge 4.0 was used. In some recordings the background noise or sounds, often including different species or hissing have been deliberately left to keep the full flavour and breadth of the sound, which often suffers while editing and manipulating the sound. However, some sounds needed minor sound manipulation to eliminate greater disturbances, though on balance this is kept to a minimum of the 196 recordings.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all I would like to thank my friend and long term companion Dr. Evgeni E. Syroechkovski, who organized most of the expeditions and who helped in so many ways to enable access to these remote areas in Siberia. Mikhail Solo- viev (MS), Heikki Karhut (HK), Hans Heiner Bergmann (HHB), Chris Kelly (CK), Semeon Grigoriev (SG) and Götz Eichhorn (GE) provided additional sound recordings from Siberia. Last not least I like to thank Stephen Bunting for his patience in helping with the sound engineering and invaluable advice on the CD design.

ABOUT BIRDSOUNDS.NL

BirdsEye is excited to be able to offer sound packages from birdsounds.nl, an internet shop that specializes in sounds of birds and nature from around the world. Their collections include nearly complete coverage for many of the most popular birding locations, especially in the Neotropics. The recordings are long, of good quality and carefully selected by birders specialized in identifying birds by their song!

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Northern Siberia Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

The aim of this work is to cover as many vocalizations of as many bird species as possible, occurring in Venezuela. Thus, in the selection of recordings, completeness was the main driver, with quality coming only in second place. Most recordings have been taken in Venezuela, but to increase the overall comprehensiveness an important number comes from other Neotropical countries. (In some cases, recordings from outside Venezuela are of a subspecies different from the one occurring in Venezuela, but I have not included recordings for which I know there is a significant difference in voice with the Venezuelan subspecies).

For some species for which I only had poor quality recordings from Venezuela I also included recordings made in adjacent countries if better ones were available, but in these cases I also kept the Venezuelan recording in the collection. Recordings that are (very) poor in quality (distant bird, background noise,..) are marked: I put behind the English name ‘()’ (like ‘between brackets’). These are however only a small minority (76 recordings to be exact, or less than 2%), the vast majority of the recordings being of good quality.

The collection of recordings presented here (4196 recordings of 1270 species) has a total playing time of over 33 hours, the equivalent of some 30 audio CD’s ! Excluding pelagic seabirds, and vagrant bird species, thus basically focusing on the regular ‘Venezuelan landbirds’, the collection can be considered quite complete (approx. 95%), and includes most of the vocalizations commonly heard while exploring Venezuelan nature. This is the first time ever such a complete collection is being published for Venezuela.

For the selection of recordings I could tap from my collection of personally made sound recordings, standing now at over 30,000 recordings, of which at least 23,000 from the Neotropics. While this formed an excellent basis to start from, it is thanks to the many contributions of other recordists that such comprehensiveness could be achieved !

I have typically included several sound files per species, e.g. to illustrate different types of vocalizations, to illustrate some degree of geographical variation or to document vocalizations from different corners of a bird’s distribution. Obviously, with mainly less than 5 recordings per species, one can only give a flavor of this. For boreal migrants such warblers, I did include some songs, although the chance to hear them in Venezuela is very small indeed.

I have used denominations like ‘song’ and ‘call’ to group the recordings, but one should not give too much importance to these denominations, as they are obviously an oversimplification of the different functions of vocalization. Nevertheless, ‘song’ typically is used for the vocalization which indicates a bird’s presence in its territory, and (especially for Passeriformes/Songbirds) this is usually the longer, more melodious vocalization of the species. ‘Call’ at the other hand is typically a shorter vocalization, and can be used either for contact, alarm, distress, etc.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to all the contributing recordists who made it possible to create this work. In alphabetic order they are Alex Lees, Alexandre Renaudier, Andrew Spencer, Arnoud Van den Berg, Bennett Hennessey, Bernabe Lopez-Lanus, Bradley Davis, Chris Parrish, Chris Sharpe, Ciro Albano, David Geale, David Van der Schoor, Dodge Engleman, Doug Knapp, Fabrice Schmitt, Geert Spanoghe, Gunter De Smet, Gustavo Rodriguez, Hans Matheve, Huw Lloyd, Jesse Fagan, John V. Moore, Joseph Tobias, Juan Mazar Barnett, Mark Van Beirs, Nathan Pieplow, Nick Athanas, Niels Krabbe, Patrik Aberg, Pete Morris, Ramiro Yabar, the late Robin Carter, Sebastian Herzog and Stefan Woltmann.

I also wish to thank Mrs. Schwartz for allowing the use of recordings of her father, the late Paul Schwartz.

And with the ever increasing number of recordings to be handled, I was happy with the support of Wim Heylen to automate some tasks in order to save some manual work.

About the Author

Peter Boesman started birding in his home country Belgium when he was twelve. He quickly started travelling all over Europe as a backpacker to learn more about the birds of the old continent. At home he made his knowledge at use by guiding nature walks, writing articles, and taking up responsibilities in the birder’s community. He was e.g. member of the Belgian Rarities Committee and co-author of the Avifauna of Flanders, Belgium.

Parallel to his studies and interest for nature, Peter also studied music, and obtained the Belgian government medal for piano and a First prize at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent (presently called a Master in Music) before he was even eighteen years old ! Whether this early interest in music developed his abilities for working with bird sounds much later in his life will remain an open question.

In the 1980’s he started travelling beyond Europe: Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, USA and finally, in 1988, he visited Venezuela, his first neotropical experience.

Only 2 years later, a managerial job opportunity offered by a Belgian multinational company made him move to Venezuela, which allowed him in his free time to get better acquainted with the local avifauna. It was also an opportunity to visit neighboring neotropical countries. Peter made several discoveries in Venezuela, and published articles about them (he was involved in the re-discovery of e.g. Grey-headed Warbler, Rusty-flanked Crake, Great Antpitta, Plain-flanked Rail and he put some new birding places on the map such as Caño Colorado in E Venezuela, now a standard stop on many birding tours).

It is in this period that he also got interested in recording bird vocalizations. There was hardly anything available about Venezuelan birds and it became quickly obvious that knowing bird songs was essential to study birds in the neotropics. Armed with a directional microphone and a tape recorder he went off in the field. This was the start of the creation of his present bird sounds collection. Soon he made many unique recordings, not only in Venezuela, but also in other neotropical countries, e.g. in Colombia he made the first recordings of a Screech Owl in the Santa Marta region, now suggested to be a new species, and in the same region he recorded in 1994 the foliage- gleaner which was described some 15 years later as Santa Marta Foliage-gleaner based on voice!

In 1995, while birding in Peru, an accident involving a Bushmaster snake had near-fatal consequences. Peter miraculously survived, but lost his complete right leg. Less than a year later, he made his first attempts to get back in the field supported by his Venezuelan wife, he continued recording bird vocalizations and did several bird-censuses of areas in NW Venezuela.

Later he moved to the USA for his job, where he published a pioneering CD-ROM Birds of Venezuela, photographs, sounds and distributions. From his new base, it didn’t take him long to venture into the northern side of the neotropics: Mexico. Even when the job called him back to Belgium, he continued travelling to Mexico, and after some years he had not only visited most corners of this magnificent country, but gathered a vast collection of bird song recordings.

In the same way, he could not resist the tempting treasure of birds in Brazil.
At the end of 2005, he again came up with a pioneering idea to publish a large set of bird song recordings on a single MP3 CD per country, for Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela.

While in Belgium, he decided it was time also for this region to have some fresh new recordings (surprisingly, very little had been published of his home country in recent decades!). He acquired the latest digital recording equipment and visited all corners of Belgium and the Netherlands. A few years later, Peter could again deliver, this time an incredible MP3 multimedia field guide of the birds of Belgium and the Netherlands. The novelty not only being the excellent sound recordings, but also the unique combination of sound, pictures, distribution maps and text in a format useable on both PC/Mac and MP3 players.

His latest achievements rightly deserve the term ‘monumental’, for the first time the vocalizations of Peru are documented in a single work containing no less than 3350 recordings of some 1530 Peruvian bird species, in a similar way he documented the birds of Costa Rica, and now there is the update for Brazil and Venezuela in which no less than 4600 (resp. 4200) recordings are included.

Through the years, Peter has observed some 3700 different bird species in the New World alone, and accumulated a bird sound collection of some 28000 recordings, all digitally available and supported by a database with recording details. He has probably published vocalizations of more bird species than anyone in the world by now, despite his serious physical handicap!

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Venezuela Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

Nicaragua is a little explored country in Central America, especially the Caribbean lowlands. Birding this country is still a challenge for birdwatchers. This CD includes some unique recordings of what may be the first published on disc from Nicaragua, including the Central American Pygmy-Owl, the Nicaraguan Grackle (a regional endemic) and the Black-capped Pygmy-Tyrant. Since Nicaragua neighbors much-visited Costa Rica, this sound collection is also very useful if you are birding there.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Doug Knapp is an international teacher and life-long birder. He has been recording since 2000 when he first captured 70 species of high Andean birds on disc in Bogotá. His Nicaraguan recording was done from 2003-2006 while a science teacher at the American Nicaraguan School in Managua. Graduated from the University of California at Irvine in 1978 in Biology, Knapp also does print publishing of South American flora & fauna. Doug Knapp combines his field recording with education projects with his students. He co-authored Aves de la Sabana de Bogotá with Gary Stiles and several others. He also co-authored the first serious tree identification guide for the same area: A Guide to the Woody Plants of Colegio Nueva Granada. Knapp has also recorded in Venezuela and Chile and has ongoing education projects elsewhere in Latin America.

Tom Will started birding while teaching English in secondary school in Connecticut and later earned a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology from The University of Michigan. He landed in the Neotropics in Guatemala in 1976, where the beauty of tropical bird song first inspired him to record. He has lived and worked as a conservation ornithologist in the Galapagos, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Chiapas, Mexico. Most of his Nicaraguan recordings were done in 1990 and 1991, while he studied bird re-colonization of lowland rain forest devastated by Hurricane Joan and bird diversity in selectively logged mid-elevation sites. In 2001 he retired from his itinerant career to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a regional landbird biologist in the Upper Midwest.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We would like to thank the following for helping make this project possible: Jeffrey McCrary, Dana Gardner, Sophie Webb, Oxford University Press, Cornell University Press, Reserva Silvestre Privada Monﰀtibelli, Pomares Salmerón, Peter Boesman, Doug Von Gausig, Los Alpes & La Casa del Cafe, Intermezzo del Bosque, Jorge and Lili Duriaux Chavarría, Bob Planque & Willem-Pier Vellinga from Xeno Canto, Rodolfo Narvaez & Jaime Incer.

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Nicaragua Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

by Peter Boesman

Colombia is the country with the highest diversity of birds on earth. For decades however, safety issues made it largely inaccessible to the birding community. In recent years, this situation has changed for the good, and it is now soon becoming a top traveling destination for eco-tourism. Therefore, I thought it would be helpful to publish a work on the birds vocalizations for all of Colombia, in a similar way I have done it now already for a number of neotropical countries.

General knowledge of bird sounds has however increased dramatically over the last decade, and as a consequence, whenever a new work is being published, also the level of expectation is gradually climbing. A mere single recording per species is no longer considered good enough a standard. I have therefore made a special effort to bring together a true sound collection, illustrating as much as possible the bird voices of Colombia: no less than 5,500 recordings of over 1,600 species are included!

My hope is that it will help birders and scientists in many ways, and will eventually – by continued interest in eco-tourism and conservation – benefit the marvelous birds of Colombia.

About this package

The aim of this work is to cover as many bird species as possible occurring in Colombia. Thus, in the selection of recordings, completeness was the main driver, with quality coming only in second place.
Many recordings have been taken in Colombia, but to increase the overall comprehensiveness, some recordings come from other Neotropical countries. (In some cases, recordings from outside Colombia are of a subspecies different from the one occurring in Colombia, but I have not included recordings for which I know there is a significant difference in voice with the Colombian subspecies).

For some species for which I only had poor quality recordings from Colombia I also included recordings made in adjacent countries if better ones were available, but in these cases I also kept the Colombian recording in the collection. Recordings that are (very) poor in quality (distant bird, background noise,..) are marked: I put behind the English name ‘()’ (like between brackets). These are however only a small minority (82 recordings to be exact), the vast majority of the recordings being of good quality.

The collection of recordings presented here has a total playing time of over 46 hours, the equivalent of 45 audio CD’s! Excluding pelagic seabirds and vagrant birds, and basically focusing on the ‘Colombian landbirds’, the collection can be considered quite complete, and includes most of the vocalizations commonly heard while exploring Colombian nature. This is the first time ever such a complete collection is being published for Colombia.

For the selection of recordings I could tap from my collection of personally made sound recordings, standing now at over 30,000 recordings, of which some 2,500 from the Neotropics. While this formed an excellent basis to start from, it is thanks to the many contributions of other recordists that such comprehensiveness could be achieved!

About the Author

Peter Boesman started birding in his home country Belgium when he was twelve. He quickly started travelling all over Europe as a backpacker to learn more about the birds of the old continent. At home he made his knowledge at use by guiding nature walks, writing articles, and taking up responsibilities in the birder’s community. He was member of the Belgian Rarities Committee and co-author of the Avifauna of Flanders, Belgium.

Parallel to his studies and interest for nature, Peter also studied music, and obtained the Belgian government medal for piano and a First prize at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent (presently called a Master in Music) before he was even eighteen years old ! Whether this early interest in music developed his abilities for working with bird sounds much later in his life will remain an open question.

In the 1980’s he started travelling beyond Europe: Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, USA and finally, in 1988, he visited Venezuela, his first neotropical experience.

Only 2 years later, a managerial job opportunity offered by a Belgian multinational company made him move to Venezuela, which allowed him in his free time to get better acquainted with the local avifauna. It was also an opportunity to visit neighboring neotropical countries. Peter made several discoveries in Venezuela, and published articles about them (he was involved in the re-discovery of Grey-headed Warbler, Rusty-flanked Crake, Great Antpitta, Plain-flanked Rail and he put some new birding places on the map such as Caño Colorado in E Venezuela, now a standard stop on many birding tours).

It is in this period that he also got interested in recording bird vocalizations. There was hardly anything available about Venezuelan birds and it became quickly obvious that knowing bird songs was essential to study birds in the neotropics. Armed with a directional microphone and a tape recorder he went off in the field. This was the start of the creation of his present bird sounds collection. Soon he made many unique recordings, not only in Venezuela, but also in other neotropical countries. In Colombia he made the first recordings of a Screech Owl in the Santa Marta region, now suggested to be a new species, and in the same region he recorded in 1994 the foliage-gleaner which was described some 15 years later as Santa Marta Foliage-gleaner based on voice!

In 1995, while birding in Peru, an accident involving a Bushmaster snake had near-fatal consequences. Peter miraculously survived, but lost his complete right leg. Less than a year later, he made his first attempts to get back in the field supported by his Venezuelan wife, he continued recording bird vocalizations and did several bird-censuses of areas in NW Venezuela.

Later he moved to the USA for his job, where he published a pioneering CD-ROM Birds of Venezuela, photographs, sounds and distributions. From his new base, it didn’t take him long to venture into the northern side of the neotropics: Mexico. Even when the job called him back to Belgium, he continued travelling to Mexico, and after some years he had not only visited most corners of this magnificent country, but gathered a vast collection of bird song recordings.

In the same way, he could not resist the tempting treasure of birds in Brazil.
At the end of 2005, he again came up with a pioneering idea to publish a large set of bird song recordings on a single MP3 CD per country, for Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela.

While in Belgium, he decided it was time also for this region to have some fresh new recordings (surprisingly, very little had been published of his home country in recent decades!). He acquired the latest digital recording equipment and visited all corners of Belgium and the Netherlands. A few years later, Peter could again deliver, this time an incredible MP3 multimedia field guide of the birds of Belgium and the Netherlands. The novelty not only being the excellent sound recordings, but also the unique combination of sound, pictures, distribution maps and text in a format useable on both PC/Mac and MP3 players.

His latest achievements rightly deserve the term ‘monumental’, for the first time the vocalizations of Peru are documented in a single work containing no less than 3350 recordings of some 1530 Peruvian bird species, in a similar way he documented the birds of Costa Rica, and now there is the update for Brazil and Venezuela in which no less than 4600 (resp. 4200) recordings are included.

Through the years, Peter has observed some 3700 different bird species in the New World alone, and accumulated a bird sound collection of some 28000 recordings, all digitally available and supported by a database with recording details. He has probably published vocalizations of more bird species than anyone in the world by now, despite his serious physical handicap !

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to all the contributing recordists who made it possible to create this work. In alphabetic order they are Alexandre Renaudier, Andrew Spencer, Arnoud Van den Berg, Bennett Hennessey, Bernabe Lopez-Lanus, Bradley Davis, Chris Parrish, Chris Sharpe, Ciro Albano, Dan Lane, David Geale, David Van der Schoor, Dodge Engleman, Doug Knapp, Fabrice Schmitt, Frank Lambert, Gunter De Smet, Gustavo Rodriguez, Hans Matheve, Huw Lloyd, Jesse Fagan, John V. Moore, Joseph Tobias, Juan Mazar Barnett, Ken Allaire, Mark Van Beirs, Nathan Pieplow, Nick Athanas, Niels Krabbe, Oswaldo Cortes, Patrik Aberg, Pete Morris, Ramiro Yabar, the late Robin Carter, Scott Olmstead, Sebastian Herzog, Stefan Woltmann and Tom Will. I also wish to thank Mrs. Schwartz for allowing the use of recordings of her father, the late Paul Schwartz. For the publication and distribution of this work, I could count again on the support of Bernard Geling of Birdsounds.nl. And with the ever increasing number of recordings to be handled, I was happy with the support of Wim Heylen to automate some tasks in order to save some manual work.

ABOUT BIRDSOUNDS.NL

BirdsEye is excited to be able to offer sound packages from birdsounds.nl, an internet shop that specializes in sounds of birds and nature from around the world. Their collections include nearly complete coverage for many of the most popular birding locations, especially in the Neotropics. The recordings are long, of good quality and carefully selected by birders specialized in identifying birds by their song!

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your Android, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Colombia Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

The aim of this sound collection is to cover as many bird species as possible occurring in Peru. While a comprehensive package was the main drive, quality was also very high on the priority list. Most audio included in this collection was recorded in Peru, but to increase the overall comprehensiveness, several come from other Neotropical countries. In some cases, recordings from outside Peru are from a different subspecies than what occurs in Peru, but I have not included recordings for which I know there is a significant difference in voice compared to the Peruvian subspecies. For the species which I only had poor quality recordings for from Peru, I included recordings from adjacent countries if a better one was available, while also keeping the Peruvian recording in the collection. Recordings that are poor in quality (distant bird, or loud background noise) are marked with () behind the name of the sound, however this is only a small number of the total collection (42 to be exact).

The collection of recordings presented here (over 3,300 recordings of about 1,500 species) has a total playing time of over 28 hours, the equivalent of some 25 audio CD’s! Excluding seabirds, thus basically focusing on the Peruvian landbirds, the collection can be considered quite complete, and includes most of the vocalizations commonly heard while exploring Peruvian nature.

For the selection of recordings, I could tap from my collection of personally made sound recordings, standing now at almost 30,000 recordings, of which about 20,000 are from the Neotropics and 3,000 from Peru. While this formed an excellent basis to start from, it is thanks to the many contributions of other recordists that such comprehensiveness could be achieved!

I have typically included several recordings per species to illustrate different types of vocalizations, to illustrate some degree of geographical variation or to document vocalizations from different corners of a bird’s distribution. Obviously, with mainly less than 5 recordings per species, one can only give a flavor of this. For boreal migrants such as warblers, I did not include songs, unless there is proof that these can be heard in Peru.

About the Author

Peter Boesman started birding in his home country Belgium when he was twelve. He quickly started travelling all over Europe as a backpacker to learn more about the birds of the old continent. At home he made his knowledge at use by guiding nature walks, writing articles, and taking up responsibilities in the birder’s community. He was member of the Belgian Rarities Committee and co-author of the Avifauna of Flanders, Belgium.

Parallel to his studies and interest for nature, Peter also studied music, and obtained the Belgian government medal for piano and a First prize at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent (presently called a Master in Music) before he was even eighteen years old ! Whether this early interest in music developed his abilities for working with bird sounds much later in his life will remain an open question.

In the 1980’s he started travelling beyond Europe: Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, USA and finally, in 1988, he visited Venezuela, his first neotropical experience.

Only 2 years later, a managerial job opportunity offered by a Belgian multinational company made him move to Venezuela, which allowed him in his free time to get better acquainted with the local avifauna. It was also an opportunity to visit neighboring neotropical countries. Peter made several discoveries in Venezuela, and published articles about them (he was involved in the rediscovery of Grey-headed Warbler, Rusty-flanked Crake, Great Antpitta, Plain-flanked Rail and he put some new birding places on the map such as Caño Colorado in E Venezuela, now a standard stop on many birding tours).

It is in this period that he also got interested in recording bird vocalizations. There was hardly anything available about Venezuelan birds and it became quickly obvious that knowing bird songs was essential to study birds in the neotropics. Armed with a directional microphone and a tape recorder he went off in the field. This was the start of the creation of his present bird sounds collection. Soon he made many unique recordings, not only in Venezuela, but also in other neotropical countries, in Colombia he made the first recordings of a Screech Owl in the Santa Marta region, now suggested to be a new species, and in the same region he recorded in 1994 the foliage-gleaner which was described some 15 years later as Santa Marta Foliage-gleaner based on voice!

In 1995, while birding in Peru, an accident involving a bushmaster, a type of poisonous snake, had near-fatal consequences. Peter miraculously survived, but lost his complete right leg. Less than a year later, he made his first attempts to get back in the field supported by his Venezuelan wife, he continued recording bird vocalizations and did several bird-censuses of areas in NW Venezuela.

Later he moved to the USA for his job, where he published a pioneering CD-ROM Birds of Venezuela, photographs, sounds and distributions. From his new base, it didn’t take him long to venture into the northern side of the neotropics: Mexico. Even when the job called him back to Belgium, he continued travelling to Mexico, and after some years he had not only visited most corners of this magnificent country, but gathered a vast collection of bird song recordings.

In the same way, he could not resist the tempting treasure of birds in Brazil.
At the end of 2005, he again came up with a pioneering idea to publish a large set of bird song recordings on a single MP3 CD per country, for Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela.

While in Belgium, he decided it was time also for this region to have some fresh new recordings (surprisingly, very little had been published of his home country in recent decades!). He acquired the latest digital recording equipment and visited all corners of Belgium and the Netherlands. A few years later, Peter could again deliver, this time an incredible MP3 multimedia field guide of the birds of Belgium and the Netherlands. The novelty not only being the excellent sound recordings, but also the unique combination of sound, pictures, distribution maps and text in a format useable on both PC/Mac and MP3 players.

His latest achievements rightly deserve the term ‘monumental’, for the first time the vocalizations of Peru are documented in a single work containing no less than 3350 recordings of some 1530 Peruvian bird species, in a similar way he documented the birds of Costa Rica, and now there is the update for Brazil and Venezuela in which no less than 4600 (resp. 4200) recordings are included.

Through the years, Peter has observed some 3700 different bird species in the New World alone, and accumulated a bird sound collection of some 28000 recordings, all digitally available and supported by a database with recording details. He has probably published vocalizations of more bird species than anyone in the world by now, despite his serious physical handicap!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to all the contributing recordists who made it possible to create this work. In alphabetic order they are Nick Athanas, Juan Mazar Barnett, Gunter De Smet, Dodge Engleman, David Geale, A. Bennett Hennessey, Sebastian K. Herzog, Niels Krabbe, Huw Lloyd, John V. Moore, Chris Parrish, Alexandre Renaudier, Gustavo Rodriguez, Fabrice Schmitt, Chris Sharpe, Wim ten Have, Mark Van Beirs, Arnoud Van den Berg, David Van den Schoor, Stefan Woltmann, Ramiro and Virgilio Yabar. I also wish to thank Mrs. Schwartz for allowing the use of recordings of her father, the late Paul Schwartz. My trips in Peru were possible thanks to field companions John Arvin, Jean Marie Daulne, Leila Kurbage, Rose Ann Rowlett, Mark Van Beirs, David Van den Schoor and the logistical support of Juvenal (Juve) Ccahuana, Luis (Lucho) Nuñez and Wim ten Have. For the publication and distribution of this work, I could count again on the support of Bernard Geling of Birdsounds.nl.

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your Android, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Peru Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

Peter Boesman was looking through other recordings for Holland and Belgium and noticed that nearly all recordings were made in the seventies and eighties, and were decades old. For Holland, most recordings were made by Rene Wanders and for elsewhere in Europe, Jean Roché contributed his sounds to nearly every European production. Every new publication coming out used these same recordings over and over again; and as the recordists were often not mentioned, nobody knew where the original material came from.

Recent studies show that it is very important to know where and when a recording of a bird was made, because not all over Europe the same species makes the same sounds. We discovered that many recordings were made in different parts of Europe like Scandinavia, Northern Africa, Israel and some even were from South Africa; pretending the sounds were from Britain or Holland!

It was for these reasons that Peter Boesman took on the task of making new recordings for the birds of Belgium and Holland. His recordings in 2007-09 were are all made with Telinga Parabolic Microphones, everything is recorded in stereo, and Peter used digital recording equipment. This all adds up to a very valuable new offering of bird sound recordings for the region. Since that first publication, Peter Boesman has been out recording additional sounds in the region as well as going to neighboring regions to collect sounds for species that are wintering or migratory, and therefore less vocal. This new collection is much more comprehensive with more recordings of more species.

Equipment

In the last 25 years a lot changed in sound recording equipment: recording and playback equipment transformed from analogue to digital; a lot of new recording equipment became available like Telinga stereo parabolic microphones, digital recording equipment and on the playback side of the market the digital music players.

A very large proportion of the sounds are recorded in Western Europe. They are almost all in stereo and of excellent quality. The collection is further completed with recordings from outside the region, typically for species that are less vocal over here.

About the Author

Peter Boesman started birding in his home country Belgium when he was twelve. He quickly started travelling all over Europe as a backpacker to learn more about the birds of the old continent. At home he made his knowledge at use by guiding nature walks, writing articles, and taking up responsibilities in the birder’s community. He was member of the Belgian Rarities Committee and co-author of the Avifauna of Flanders, Belgium.

Parallel to his studies and interest for nature, Peter also studied music, and obtained the Belgian government medal for piano and a First prize at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent (presently called a Master in Music) before he was even eighteen years old ! Whether this early interest in music developed his abilities for working with bird sounds much later in his life will remain an open question.

In the 1980’s he started travelling beyond Europe: Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, USA and finally, in 1988, he visited Venezuela, his first neotropical experience.

Only 2 years later, a managerial job opportunity offered by a Belgian multinational company made him move to Venezuela, which allowed him in his free time to get better acquainted with the local avifauna. It was also an opportunity to visit neighboring neotropical countries. Peter made several discoveries in Venezuela, and published articles about them (he was involved in the rediscovery of Grey-headed Warbler, Rusty-flanked Crake, Great Antpitta, Plain-flanked Rail and he put some new birding places on the map such as Caño Colorado in E Venezuela, now a standard stop on many birding tours).

It is in this period that he also got interested in recording bird vocalizations. There was hardly anything available about Venezuelan birds and it became quickly obvious that knowing bird songs was essential to study birds in the neotropics. Armed with a directional microphone and a tape recorder he went off in the field. This was the start of the creation of his present bird sounds collection. Soon he made many unique recordings, not only in Venezuela, but also in other neotropical countries, in Colombia he made the first recordings of a Screech Owl in the Santa Marta region, now suggested to be a new species, and in the same region he recorded in 1994 the foliage-gleaner which was described some 15 years later as Santa Marta Foliage-gleaner based on voice!

In 1995, while birding in Peru, an accident involving a bushmaster, a type of poisonous snake, had near-fatal consequences. Peter miraculously survived, but lost his complete right leg. Less than a year later, he made his first attempts to get back in the field supported by his Venezuelan wife, he continued recording bird vocalizations and did several bird-censuses of areas in NW Venezuela.

Later he moved to the USA for his job, where he published a pioneering CD-ROM Birds of Venezuela, photographs, sounds and distributions. From his new base, it didn’t take him long to venture into the northern side of the neotropics: Mexico. Even when the job called him back to Belgium, he continued travelling to Mexico, and after some years he had not only visited most corners of this magnificent country, but gathered a vast collection of bird song recordings.

In the same way, he could not resist the tempting treasure of birds in Brazil.
At the end of 2005, he again came up with a pioneering idea to publish a large set of bird song recordings on a single MP3 CD per country, for Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela.

While in Belgium, he decided it was time also for this region to have some fresh new recordings (surprisingly, very little had been published of his home country in recent decades!). He acquired the latest digital recording equipment and visited all corners of Belgium and the Netherlands. A few years later, Peter could again deliver, this time an incredible MP3 multimedia field guide of the birds of Belgium and the Netherlands. The novelty not only being the excellent sound recordings, but also the unique combination of sound, pictures, distribution maps and text in a format useable on both PC/Mac and MP3 players.

His latest achievements rightly deserve the term ‘monumental’, for the first time the vocalizations of Peru are documented in a single work containing no less than 3,350 recordings of some 1530 Peruvian bird species, in a similar way he documented the birds of Costa Rica, and now there is the update for Brazil and Venezuela (also available in BirdsEye) in which no less than 4,600 recordings are included.

Through the years, Peter has observed some 3,700 different bird species in the New World alone, and accumulated a bird sound collection of some 28,000 recordings, all digitally available and supported by a database with recording details. He has probably published vocalizations of more bird species than anyone in the world by now, despite his serious physical handicap!

ABOUT BIRDSOUNDS.NL

BirdsEye is excited to be able to offer sound packages from birdsounds.nl, an internet shop that specializes in sounds of birds and nature from around the world. Their collections include nearly complete coverage for many of the most popular birding locations, especially in the Neotropics. The recordings are long, of good quality and carefully selected by birders specialized in identifying birds by their song!

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Belgium and Holland Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

Whether you live in Australia or are traveling there for some birding, this sound package will provide you with an unmatched collection of bird sounds, at your fingertips in the field.

Identifying birds by their song in the Australian environment can often be frustrating as many species have different local dialects in different parts of the country. In other cases, species mimic other birds so well that it is hard to tell the real bird and its imitator. Some closely related species (some flycatchers and cuckoos) sing almost identical songs, although they are often geographically isolated from each other and live in different parts of the continent.

If you want to learn to bird in Australia, you will need to learn the sounds. This package is just what you need. The bird sounds in this package were recorded all over Australia. For each species, multiple recordings are presented to provide you with a more holistic understanding of the full range of its repertoire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The recordist Fred van Gessel has been recording Australia’s bird sounds for over 35 years. He has recorded a unique and comprehensive collection of well over 30,000 cuts of birds, animals and insects. A selection of his finest cuts can be heard on these recordings.

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone and Android devices so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Australia Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

No less than 4,699 recordings of 1,558 species are included in this collection!
That number is 95% of all the land birds of Brazil. The collection of recordings has a total playing time of over 41 hours, the equivalent of some 40 audio CD’s.

ALL THE SOUNDS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

When preparing for a bird trip to Brazil, the selection of bird sounds can be a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. Now Peter Boesman has done the work for you. The sounds for this production were carefully selected, checked and integrated by him.

A LANDMARK PRODUCTION

This collection can be considered quite complete (> 95% Brazilian bird species can be found in this single package). It includes most of the vocalizations commonly heard while exploring Brazilian nature. This is the first time ever such a complete collection is being published for Brazil. Nearly half of all South-American bird species are included here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR PETER BOESMAN

Peter Boesman, has captured over 30,000 bird recordings from the Neotropics over the last 25 years, making him one of the leading bird sound recordists in the world. Peter has augmented his own recordings in this collection with some excellent contributions of other recordists in order to create the most comprehensive collection possible!

ABOUT BIRDSOUNDS.NL

BirdsEye is excited to be able to offer sound packages from birdsounds.nl, an internet shop that specializes in sounds of birds and nature from around the world. Their collections include nearly complete coverage for many of the most popular birding locations, especially in the Neotropics. The recordings are long, of good quality and carefully selected by birders specialized in identifying birds by their song!

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Brazil Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.

This is the first extensive collection of sounds of Birds for Costa Rica!

In recent years, almost every country in the neotropics has seen a publication covering its bird sounds. Surprisingly however, this had not been the case for Costa Rica, which is one of the most bird-rich countries on earth, and perhaps the number one destination for eco-tourists.

OVERVIEW

No less than 765 species and 2060 recordings are included in this package. The total play time for the included sounds is over 15 hours! The collection includes most of the vocalizations commonly heard while exploring Costa Rican habitats. The only significant gaps are pelagic seabirds and some of the Cocos island endemics.

FOCUS ON LOCAL COSTA RICAN SOUNDS

Most of the recordings were captured in Costa Rica so they represent the local sounds of birds that have wide ranges. In some cases recordings of species that are rare in Costa Rica are included from nearby countries.

MORE SPECIES, MORE RECORDINGS PER SPECIES

General knowledge of bird sounds has increased dramatically over the last decade; a mere single recording per species is no longer considered good enough. We have made a special effort to create unique sound collection that illustrates the incredible bird voices of Costa Rica.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Boesman, has captured over 30,000 bird recordings from Costa Rica and elsewhere in the Neotropics over the last 25 years, making him one of the leading bird sound recordists in the world. Peter has augmented his own recordings with some excellent contributions of other recordists in order to create the most comprehensive collection possible!

HOW SOUND PACKAGES WORK IN BIRDSEYE

Purchasing this package gives you access to a large collection of bird sounds, all within BirdsEye. It also gives you access to the BirdsEye images and text, as well as the eBird data available for the species that are included in the package.

You can download it to your phone for offline use and remove it to free up space as often as you wish. You can access this package on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so long as they are all registered to your BirdsEye account. To download all of the sounds for offline use, just go to “Settings” and then choose “Download for Offline”. Enjoy!

The post Birds of Costa Rica Sound Collection appeared first on BirdsEye Nature Apps.