Welcome To Naturerecordists 2001 Worldwide Dawn Chorus Project
September 1, 2001
| The magical boundary between night and day holds a special place for the natural world. At dawn the night creatures are going home and the day creatures are waking up. How valuable is the currency of sound when the only light in the sky is a thread of curved luminence at the edge of the world? For birds, the dawn chorus is an expression of being. By ones and twos it builds, sometimes to thousands of voices, until the dawn chorus can appear to us as a sonic wall of birds. But to the singers the wall is a rich mosaic of individual neighbors and how they fit together to make a community. Lasting only a short time in each location as it sweeps around the world, the dawn chorus illuminates a band of earth from pole to pole as brightly in its way as does the sun. Inspired by an essay written by Don Kroodsma, the online world community of natual sound recordists (naturerecordists@yahoogroups.com) decided to produce a virtual dawn chorus for the same day. On September 1, 2001, recordists around the world got up before dawn, set up their equipment, and, for the first time, captured some of the grand acoustic sweep in a simultaneous collaborative effort. Their results are presented here, small unbidden moments in time, an audio experience, never before attempted, of the natural world waking up on the same day.
Don Kroodsma's inspirational article, plus some very nice singing bird photographs, can be found at: www.naturesound.com/kroods/kroods.html Greg Clark, 2001 |