Ever since Cornell University ornithologists captured the first ever sound recordings of wild birds almost 100 years ago, bird sound recordists have tried to capture as many recordings, of as many species, in as many places as possible.
Today, on websites like the Macaulay Library, one can access millions of such sounds, including digitized historical recordings as well as contemporary ones uploaded to the site directly by scientists, recordists, and amateurs across the globe. These websites catalogue the sounds of the world’s bird species over time and space and are thus immensely important to science, education, and culture.
In our current era of rapid avian extinction, these archives also increasingly bear a heavy burden: to preserve the sounds of species that can no longer be heard in the wild. Where were these recordings captured, by whom, and why? What does it mean to have access to these recordings today? And what role might they have in halting further extinctions? In this presentation, Professor Hannah Hunter will discuss these entanglements of extinction and bird sound recording in historical and contemporary North American ornithology, focusing on some key case studies including the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the Puerto-Rican Nightjar, and the Hawaiian Crow.
Hannah Hunter is a lecturer in Environmental History at Trent University in Canada, having recently completed her PhD at Queen’s University. Hannah’s Vanier Scholarship-funded PhD research focused on avian extinction and the history of bird sound recording in North America, which involved substantive archival research as a visiting fellow at Cornell University.
Registration for this free webinar is required: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-9FWQZkrTcaz8PvK9trVmw
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Image: Photograph of a male ivory-billed woodpecker leaving the nest as the female returns, taken on the Singer Tract, Louisiana, April 1935, Credit: Arthur A. Allen