"Songs of Disappearance - Australian Bird Calls"

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Nature, Biodiversity, Wildlife

Ed Hessler

The animated video (3m 31s), Songs of Disappearance - Australian Bird Calls was made by the Bowerbird Collective (Australia).

The calls are of 53 endangered species. There is a list of the cast at the end but it is not on screen long enough to be read.

NPR doesn't miss this kind of reporting and the report by Megan Lim and Patrick Jarenwattananon fills in some details (but not the list) and includes two lovely photographs and a link to the video. They note that in December, "it briefly perched at No. 3 on the country's top 50 albums chart - ahead of Taylor Swift." 

Not all of the songs are what we think of as bird songs. Sean Dooley (Birdlife Australia) has this to say about the Christmas Island frigatebird (Fregata andrewsi): "...the male, it has a flap of skin under its chin that it inflates like a giant red balloon. And so when it's doing these  courtship sounds, it looks incredible as well as sounds bizarre."