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![\"ammodramus_maritimus_nigrescens\"](\"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/ammodramus_maritimus_nigrescens.jpg\" "\\"ammodramus_maritimus_nigrescens\\"")
<\/a>On its Florida Bird Sounds<\/a> page, the FMNH posts links to .wav files of the songs of many Florida Birds, including the Dusky Seaside Sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens<\/em>), of which the last individual died in captivity in 1987 at Walt Disney World.\u00a0 You might argue that they weren’t amazing songsters, but I rather like their style.\u00a0 In addition to the FMNH site, the Macaulay Library<\/a> has an extensive collection of Dusky Seaside Sparrow recordings.<\/p>\n Macaulay also has a number of other extinct bird sounds.\u00a0 One of its crown jewels is, of course, Arthur Allen’s famous 1935 recording<\/a> of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (Campephilus principalis<\/em>) in Louisiana.\u00a0 Interestingly, a search in the Macaulay catalog for “Ivory-billed Woodpecker” also turns up John Dennis’s 1968 recording from Texas<\/a>, a cut that has been the subject of much debate — see the “Notes” section of the linked page for a hint of the history of the discussion.<\/p>\n This was one of my most exciting finds.\u00a0 Both the Macaulay Library and the Borror Lab<\/a> have copies of the two known recordings of Bachman’s Warbler (Vermivora bachmanii<\/em>), from 1954<\/a> and 1959<\/a>, some of the species’ final years.\u00a0 One of the reasons I find the song of this species so fascinating is that it contains more than an echo of the more familiar sounds of its surviving relatives, the Blue-winged and Golden-winged Warblers.\u00a0 In short, in spite of everything, it sounds ordinary<\/em> — which just makes it the more remarkable.<\/p>\n It’s not surprising that Hawaiian birds should make up a good percentage of the extinct species for which recordings exist: first, because Hawaii has lost so many species (around 35 since 1800) and, second, because a number of those extinctions have occurred in recent years, during the era of audio recording. \u00a0 Here is a sampling of Macaulay’s treasures:<\/p>\n There may well be other extinct Hawaiian bird recordings out there, but I didn’t have time to track down any more.\u00a0 Note that the Borror and Macaulay search functions, and likely other internet searches as well, often have difficulty with the apostrophes that are ubiquitous in Hawaiian bird names, so searching the scientific names tends to work much better.<\/p>\n Xeno-canto has a couple of recordings of the last wild individual<\/a> Spix’s Macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii<\/em>) from the year 2000.\u00a0 Like the Hawaiian Crow, this species persists in captivity, so hopefully its absence from the wild is temporary.<\/p>\n The Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris<\/em>), endemic to New Zealand, was last seen in the early 20th century, so no recordings of its song exist.\u00a0 However, in the early 1990s, British composer David Hindley attempted to recreate its song using a computer.\u00a0 Hindley’s efforts were based on a pretty solid foundation: in 1954, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation had made recordings of an elderly Maori man named Henare Hemana (or Hamana or Haumana; sources differ on his name), who remembered the song of the Huia from his youth and was able to whistle an imitation of it for the recorder.\u00a0 Hindley used that recording, together with recordings of extant New Zealand birds, to try to recreate the Huia’s song as accurately as possible.\u00a0 You can’t listen to Hindley’s work on the web, as far as I know, but you can hear the original recording of Hemana’s imitation here<\/a> (by playing the embedded video).\u00a0 Hemana’s whistles sound otherworldly, beautiful, and entirely appropriate for a bird as unique and highly prized as the Huia.<\/p>\n Interestingly, after he recreated the Huia’s song, Hindley was commissioned to recreate the sounds of the extinct Dodo (Raphus cucullatus<\/em>) of the island of Mauritius.\u00a0 Hindley admitted that his Dodo song was “a fantasy,” because almost no information about the bird’s actual call has survived, but he used what he knew about doves (the Dodo’s relatives) and his own imagination to create a sound that included bass-register cooing, “screaming” and “percussive sounds.”\u00a0 Wouldn’t you love to hear that in a Mauritian forest?\u00a0 Unfortunately, like his Huia reconstruction, Hindley’s Dodo sounds don’t seem to be available on the web.<\/p>\n The coo\/scream\/bang of Hindley’s Dodo provides us with a nice transition into the looniness I promised earlier.\u00a0 Perhaps taking inspiration from Hindley, a German avant-garde musician named Wolfgang M\u00fcller in December 2008 published a collection of reconstructed sounds of extinct birds called S\u00e9ance Vocibus Avium<\/em>.\u00a0 Packaged with a 40-page book, the CD contains eleven tracks, one per species, each authored by a different avant-garde musician.\u00a0 Unlike Hindley, M\u00fcller et al. didn’t have whistled imitations to start with; they worked only from published voice descriptions, some of them very old.\u00a0 The list of species is quite diverse:<\/p>\n As of this writing, all eleven of these tracks can be heard on the internet.\u00a0 They were played on the 22 January 2009 broadcast of The Wire’s<\/a> Adventures in Modern Music<\/a>, which can be downloaded<\/a> or streamed<\/a>; tracks 1-5 can be heard from 31:30 to 36:45, and tracks 6-11 can be heard between 1:19:15 and 1:24:30 (update: those links are now broken, but you can hear four of the tracks here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Warning: you may not recognize the other sounds on this broadcast as music.\u00a0 You may get particularly confused at 1:19:15, as the recreated sound of the Mauritius Blue Pigeon begins to crossfade in over the end of the previous track, which is called “Extensity Of Hard Disk Drive” and indeed sounds like something my computer hardware might sing if I were using it as a percussion instrument.\u00a0 Except for the pigeon, all the other tracks are introduced by a man’s voice speaking the common name of the bird in German, much as you would expect on a commercial bird sound CD.<\/p>\n My reaction to these tracks was decidedly mixed.\u00a0 I liked the ‘o’o, the pigeon, the rail and the caracara.\u00a0 The Pink-headed Duck and the Heath Hen sounded to me like people imitating birds. In the cases of the Jamaica Petrel and the Lord Howe Starling, the artists seem more interested in their art than in any real attempt at verosimilitude: the petrel “call” harkens forward to a time when humans have solved the extinction crisis by introducing cybernetic replicas of endangered species<\/a> into the wild, and the guy who did the starling was just plain frightening.<\/p>\n I have to say, though, that the grand finale, the Great Auk, was well worth the wait. It also sounded like a person imitating a bird, but with masterful abandon, squawking and gurgling in ways I think would have been worthy of the Original Penguin itself.\u00a0 Great fun.<\/p>\n I’d love to hear of more sounds of extinct birds on the web, if anyone finds others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever wondered what a Dodo sounded like? Or a Great Auk? Or a Kaua’i ‘O’o?<\/p>\n On a whim, I went looking for sounds of extinct birds on the internet, and I found a lot more than I bargained for — in more ways than one. I managed to turn up some of the rarest, most remarkable, saddest and most haunting recordings I’ve ever heard…and also some of the looniest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,229],"tags":[47,43,46,42,44,48,45],"class_list":["post-316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extinct-birds","category-music","tag-bachmans-warbler","tag-dodo","tag-dusky-seaside-sparrow","tag-huia","tag-ivory-billed-woodpecker","tag-seance-vocibus-avium","tag-spixs-macaw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Ivory-billed Woodpecker<\/h4>\n
Bachman’s Warbler<\/h4>\n
Hawaiian Birds<\/h4>\n
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Spix’s Macaw<\/h4>\n
<\/a>Huia<\/h4>\n
S\u00e9ance Vocibus Avium<\/h4>\n
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