Recording bird calls can help protect Tasmania’s birds

The birds on your property have something to tell you! Here, ecologists Erin Harris and Ramit Singal share why we need more bird call recordings, and how you can be involved.

We hear birds around us every day. Some days we tune them out and get on with our busy lives. Other days we pause to appreciate a particularly beautiful song that captures our attention. And sometimes we pick up our binoculars, head outdoors and immerse ourselves in their world.

Whatever kind of day you’re having, the birds don’t stop singing. What if we could use those songs to better understand birds and help protect them? Well…we can.

What birds can tell us

A bird’s song or call can tell us many different things without us even needing to see the bird.

A recording can reveal which bird species are present, whether they’re breeding, how many there might be and even the timing of seasonal events. It can help us understand how birds use habitat, how communities form and how they respond to change or disturbance. For these reasons, recording birds has become a powerful tool for researchers. Now anyone can also easily record and identify local bird calls and contribute to scientific knowledge, using a smartphone and freely available apps such as Merlin Bird ID.

Why recordings matter

Bird calls from around the world are being captured and stored in online repositories known as call libraries. Platforms such as Xeno-canto and the Macaulay Library hold many thousands of bird recordings. These libraries are essentially collections of bird voices, with each recording helping build our understanding of a species. Importantly, they are open access, meaning recordings can be freely used by researchers, conservation organisations, educators, consultants, software developers and anyone with an interest in bird song. The value of a recording grows enormously when it is shared, particularly when it is shared for free.

This open access is what makes bird call identification tools like Merlin Bird ID, BirdNET and Google Perch possible. These apps listen to the birds around you and identify which species are calling, drawing on the thousands of recordings contributed by people all over the world. The AI and machine-learning models behind them must be trained on examples of each species’ calls. In the case of Merlin, for example, this number is typically a minimum of around 150 high-quality recordings per species. The more calls and variation captured, the more robust the model becomes.

These apps work particularly well in North America and Europe, where many avid bird sound recorders publicly share their work. But in Australia, and especially Tasmania, our birds remain underrepresented in these libraries. Funded by a grant from the Wedgetail Foundation, ecologists Erin Harris and Ramit Singal are working to address this gap through a year-long project focused on expanding Tasmania’s bird call library, particularly for endemic and threatened species.

Their project aims to locate existing recordings that may be sitting unused on people’s hard drives, make new recordings in the field and encourage the broader community to contribute as much as possible to open-access libraries.

How you can help

A key part of their project is community involvement. Many of Tasmania’s most valuable habitats occur on private land. Through Land for Wildlife, landholders are already protecting forests, wetlands, grasslands and coastal habitats that support remarkable bird diversity. These properties represent an incredible opportunity for landholders, with access to habitats that researchers don’t have, to record their property’s unique sounds. Even a handful of recordings from a property can provide valuable information and help fill important gaps in our knowledge.

The good news is that contributing is easier than ever. You don’t need expensive equipment or specialist microphones – all you need is a smartphone and a free app such as Merlin Bird ID.

To help people get started, Erin and Ramit will be running workshops on how to record bird calls and contribute them to open-access databases. It’s easier than you might think.

If you are interested in recording the birds on your property, they will be holding a recording workshop on Saturday 22 August in Exeter, in partnership with TLC’s Land for Wildlife program.

It’s a great opportunity to connect more closely with the birds on your property and learn more about the species that visit you.

By Erin Harris and Ramit Singal

Banner photo of yellow-throated honeyeater by Ramit Singal.