The Macaulay Library, Bird Songs, and Citizen Science

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Patient readers, this post will be shorter than the topic, and you, deserve, and also late, but I’m pressed temporally. (I lost around eight hours on a post I did all the research on that turned out to be a snipe hunt initiated by the Financial Times, no less, plus the hours that Black Insurrectionist dude sucked up. I want to take a nap. Immediately. But first–)

I still follow the sadly diminished New Yorker, hoping dimly for a turnaround, and yesterday this tweet came across my feed:

Bird-watching is a misleading term, Rivka Galchen writes. So much of the fleeting, present-tense pleasure of it is bird-listening. But what are birds saying? https://t.co/O0z0uxvkdH

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) October 15, 2024

So I read “How Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong.” The deck reads “Language is said to make us human. What if birds talk, too?”, which is an copy editing fail, since language, if spoken by a sentient being — say, a human — isn’t decoded; it’s understood, not being encrypted. Wittgenstein remarked, gnomically: “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” Language is a “form of life,” and a lion’s life is so different from ours that its (their?) language would make to sense to us; it could even be translated. And birds, unlike lions, aren’t even mammals. They’re “feathered theropod dinosaurs“!

But enough amateur philosophy. Let’s do some amateur science writing! This New Yorker paragraph caught my eye:

In 1889, Ludwig Paul Koch, an eight-year-old boy in Frankfurt, Germany, received a present from his father: an Edison phonograph and some wax cylinders for recording sounds. The oldest known audio of birdsong is young Koch’s recording of his pet white-rumped shama, a smallish songbird with a dark head, an orange body, and feathers that resemble a white bustle on its glossy black tail. A shama sings like a small chamber orchestra, with slippery, percussive, and sweet sounds in phrases of varying lengths. Many similar recordings followed. In 1929, the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds—now the Macaulay Library—was started with a few hard-won recordings of a sparrow, a wren, and a grosbeak. (Cornell is to ornithology what the Juilliard School is to music.)

In one of the many loose ends in this story, we don’t find out if Koch’s recordings ended up in the Macaulay Library.

Macaulay Library (“Macaulay”)[1] makes uploaded birdsong recordings easy to share by making them embeddable, like YouTubes or Tiktoks. (Here are some other examples of Macaulay embeddings turned up by search: Shoofly Magazine, Partners in Flight, and The Well.) And the Macaulay Library — not to drag Water Cooler into the pages of Naked Capitalism proper — is the source of the birdsongs that I run every day. It’s pleasant to begin an assault on the day’s landfill of content by finding pretty birdsongs. Readers have been especially enjoying mimidae, mimics, like mockingbirds, thrashers, and catbird. So here is a catbird from Macaulay Library. Grab a cup of coffee:

One reason these recordings are such a pleasure is the metadata, like Location: “Indian Springs Wildlife Management Area; along Blair’s Valley Road, Washington, Maryland, United States.” And the media notes: “Catbird singing from roadside vegetation.” This is an enormous country, part of an even more wonderful and variegated world.

I’ve been running Macaulay’s birdsong recordings for some years, but I had no idea how important an institution it was. In this post I will look very sketchily at the Macaulay’s history, discuss citizen science and the Macaulay, and conclude.

The History of the Macaulay Library

From Wikipedia (sorry);

Arthur Augustus Allen and Peter Paul Kellogg made the first recordings of bird sound on May 18, 1929, in an Ithaca park. They used motion-picture film with synchronized sound to record a song sparrow, a house wren, and a rose-breasted grosbeak. This was the Beginning of Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Graduate student Albert R. Brand and Cornell undergraduate M. Peter Keane developed recording equipment for use in the open field. In the next two years they had successfully recorded more than 40 species of birds. In 1931 Peter Keane and True McLean (a Cornell professor in Electrical Engineering) designed and built a parabolic reflector for field recordings of bird songs. They used World War I parabola molds from the Cornell Physics Department. In 1940 Albert R. Brand produced an extensive bird song field guide album “American Bird Songs”. The sales of phonograph records of bird sounds remained a key source of income for the Lab of Ornithology since these days.

(Macauley birdsong URLs come in the form https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/[XXXXXXXXX], the word “asset” being there for good reason, as the Conclusion will suggest. And:

The name of Macaulay Library honoring Linda and William (Bill) Macaulay, which donated a significant campaign contribution to fund the new facility (2003) of the library at Sapsucker Woods. Linda Macaulay added also nearly 6,000 individual birdsong recordings of over 2,600 species.

(There are other mergers and acquistions along the way since 1929, but this is not a business history, so we will pass over them.) About Bill Macaulay, from the Cornell Chronicle:

The Linda R. and William E. Macaulay Library at the Lab of Ornithology, named after Bill and wife Linda, is the premier archive of media from the natural world, with more than 15 million photos, sound recordings and videos of wildlife, including 95% of the bird species on Earth.

“The exponential growth of the collection was made possible by Bill and Linda,” said Mike Webster, director of the Macaulay Library, “but the truly transformative effect of their support is that it’s become more than just a collection. It’s a global network, with more than 78,000 contributors uploading directly from field sites – and these assets are being used for research, education and outreach all around the world.”…

As founder and chairman of First Reserve Corp., the first global private equity firm focused exclusively on energy, Bill Macaulay’s business took him and Linda across the world. That, plus Linda Macaulay’s passion for birds and her dedication to recording their sounds, was a fortuitous combination for the Lab of Ornithology.

(Pre-cable daytime television showed black-and-white ads for an entity called “First Jersey Securities,” and something about them made me determined never to get involved with a financial company whose name began with “First” (let alone “Mom’s”). But perhaps I was wrong!) Macaulay Library like Carnegie Libraries, I suppose, or the great museums the less hell-bound robber barons endowed, back in the previous Gilded Age.

CItizen Science and the Macaulay Library

From the Cornell Lab, “Citizen Science: Be Part of Something Bigger,” their list of once-a-year bird counts:

Great Backyard Bird Count: A 4-day count held over a long weekend in February. Watch birds in your backyard or anywhere else, and be part of this 20+ year tradition and help provide scientists with a snapshot of bird populations. Participate from anywhere in the world. More about the GBBC.

Global Big Days: Each year in May and October, tens of thousands of people go birding on a single day and enter their records into eBird. The final tally often exceeds 7,000 species—nearly three-quarters of the world’s bird species in a single day. You can participate from anywhere in the world. More about Global Big Day.

Christmas Bird Count: The citizen-science project that started it all, more than a century ago. It’s now an event held around the world, involving single-day counts between December 14 and January 5 each season. Birders count every individual bird they see or hear all day, traveling in organized groups that can include both experienced birders and beginners. Chances are there’s a count near you—find out more via Audubon.

And there are many, many more. The key point for our purposes:

If you take photos of birds or record the sounds they make, you can contribute them to the Macaulay Library and help document the planet’s bird life. The Macaulay Library is a multimedia scientific archive for research, education, and conservation containing more than audio for more than 80% of the world’s birds, and more than 10 million photographs.

It’s very hard to see these archival contributions as anything but an unambiguously good thing. I love the headline on this page: “Citizen Science: Be Part of Something Bigger.” We need a lot more of that[2].

Conclusion

It occurred to me that the Macauley Library, like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, is one of the institutions that might come out on the other side of whatever evolutionary chokepoint is to come. Then again, the current implementation requires a reliable power grid, being reliant on digital storage and the Intertube for submissions. Perhaps a subset of birdsongs could be re-recorded and preserved on a device similar to Edison’s original Phonograph, with the sound incised onto a wax cylinder, and played by turning a manual crank.

Less concretely and more thematically appropriate for a blog of this name, what “assets” are we looking at, here? From Social Studies of Science, “Trading twitter: Amateur recorders and economies of scientific exchange at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds“:

Scientists have long engaged in collaborations with field collectors, but how are such collaborations established and maintained? This article examines structures of collaborative data collection between professional scientists and various field recorders around the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. The Library collects animal sound recordings for use in education, preservation, and entertainment, but primarily in the scientific field of bio-acoustics. Since 1945, the Library has enlisted academic researchers, commercial recorders and broadcasters (such as the British Broadcasting Corporation), and amateur sound hunters in its expansion. I argue that the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds managed to craft and sustain a crucial network of contributors through creative and strategic brokering with its collection of recordings/data. Drawing on notions from exchange theory, I show that sound recordings were valued not just as scientific data, but also as copyrighted commodities that could be bought, sold, traded, and converted in a range of economic, social, and symbolic capitals within collaborators’ respective social fields. Thus, aligning collaborators’ interests, these exchange relations enabled the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds to negotiate amateur recorders’ reliability, willingness to share work, and commitment to scientific standards, as well as the bonds that solidified their collaboration with the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Attending to the micro-economics of data exchange, this article thus brings into perspective the multi-dimensional processes through which data-flows are managed.

From the contributor’s perspective (in the jargon, “the recordist”) a recording is not economic capital (although it may certainly be for Macaulay), but is social capital (relational, networking) and symbolic capital (reputational). This, well, capital structure [has made | has not prevented ] the Macauley project from being an enormous success of endless forms most beautiful. I wonder if similar patterns occur in other contributor-driven archives, like Gisaid? Or, for that matter, Github?

NOTES

[1] Yes, spelled like “Macaulay Culkin.”

[2] There’s no reason that citizen science can’t be quite sophisticated. From Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, “A Successful Crowdsourcing Approach for Bird Sound Classification“: “Birdwatchers are experts on identifying bird vocalizations and form an ideal focal audience for a citizen science project aiming for the required multitudes of annotated avian audio data. For this purpose, we launched a web portal that was targeted and advertised to Finnish birdwatchers. The users were asked to complete two kinds of tasks: 1) classify if a given bird sound belonged to the focal species and 2) classify all the bird species vocalizing in 10-second audio clips. In less than a year, the portal achieved annotations for 244,300 bird sounds and 5,358 clips, and attracted, on average, 70 visitors on daily basis. More than 200 birdwatchers took part in the classification tasks, of which 17 and 4 most dedicated users produced over half of the sound and clip classifications, respectively” (note the power curve — “17 and 4” — which I would speculate is characteristic of these efforts.

APPENDIX: The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology… an Historical Perspective with Randy Little

Randy Little is “a recordist of note“:

Those recordings with a portable recording unit were memorable for Little, but perhaps the most memorable recording, Little says, took place on Baffin Island, Canada. William “Bill” Gunn, a renowned recordist, wanted to publish a collection of the sounds of North American shorebirds and one of the last recordings Gunn needed for his collection was a Common Ringed Plover in North America. Gunn called upon Little to help him with the last recording. Little jumped at the opportunity to join Gunn in the field, but Gunn’s health was deteriorating, so Little headed to the arctic alone to get the coveted recording. On the first flight up to Baffin Island, Little only got as far as Frobisher Bay. The second flight took him to Baffin Island, but it took three attempts to actually land the plane due to weather. Finally, Little made it to Baffin, but the weather was still miserable with strong winds blowing across the treeless tundra. Little spent several days out on the tundra trying to get a recording of the Common Ringed Plover with little success. On the very last day at the last minute before his plane was about to leave Little heard a Common Ringed Plover flying overhead. He started recording immediately when a second plover circled in and landed near the rock shelter he built early. He scurried back to the rock shelter and recorded a pair of Common Ringed Plovers in the nick of time. “Holy cow, how lucky can you be,” said Little as he hurried back to catch his plane.

“The coveted asset recording”….