(Graeme last updated the text below in March 2015)

I have been recording bird sounds all over Australia since the early 1960’s when I started out with a Uher 4000-S reel to reel recorder. With the advent of cassette tapes I graduated to Sony Walkman WMD6C Professional recorders. I used a number of different Sennheiser microphones over the years until, in recent times, I have been using a Sennheiser Short shotgun microphone K6/ME66 in a Rycote Softee windshield, mainly with Olympus LS-10 digital recorders. (See details under Recording Bird Sound)

I processed the sounds on this website using BIAS Peak and Soundsoap software on a Macintosh computer. They have been edited to remove unwanted sounds and sometimes filtered to remove unwanted environmental noise. So they are there for your interest and enjoyment  and generally unsuitable for scientific purposes. I can access the originals in most cases (some of them are on cassettes) but it can be very time consuming and I don’t do it lightly. If you want a copy you’ll have to record it through your speaker, perfectly good enough for most purposes.

I try not to guess when describing the function of each call. Where possible, I simply describe the situation - song is usually obvious. More importantly when editing, I don’t alter the intervals between successive phrases – the length of such intervals is as important as the sounds themselves. Each sample has a maximum size of 1 MB in MP3 format so on some slow systems they can take a while to load so be patient – there may be a short interval after you press the sound button.

The list at the right shows the species currently represented on the site.

This is very much a work in progress and only presents a very small segment of my sound library.