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!

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