It’s 5:30 on an early summertime early morning, and Laura Sebastianelli is starting down Acadia’s Ship Harbor Trail. She’s using earphones, bring a digital recorder in a fanny pack, and is intending a big parabolic microphone–about the size of a garbage can cover–in the instructions of a little warbler.
“So we’re actually hearing two common yellowthroats, probably kind of counter-singing,” Sebastianelli says. “So it’s one male is telling another male this is my territory, and the other saying this is my territory. Likely, I’m not in their head, but.”
In truth, this is likewise Sebastianelli’s area.
“For the last, well this is my 6th year, I come here in May and June to tape-record all the vocalizations of the bird sounds of Acadia,” she says.
Over the course of a year, Acadia National Park is home to more than 300 types of birds. But as the environment modifications, those populations remain in flux. To produce a standard for studying that modification in the years to come, Sebstianelli becomes part of a group of volunteers that making field recordings of as lots of types as they can, while they’re still here.
Murray Carpenter
/
Maine Public
Before Sebastianelli began her field recordings, there were simply 58 tracks of bird calls from Acadia National Park archived on tape. Now she and her group have actually put together over 1,200, developing an audio standard for future scientists.
Earlier this month, she encountered an American bittern, a high slim wetlands bird that remains in high decrease. It came all of a sudden close, and she had the ability to record a clear recording.
“I could see the whole body experience of this bird. It like throws its head up in the air, and it looks like it’s snatching an insect, and it does its kind of gulping thing. And it’s just, wow,” Sebastianelli says. “And to think, these are the stories of Acadia in their own voice. This is their voice telling us the story.”
And part of the story they are informing has to do with the altering environment, and what it implies for wildlife populations.
“Birds in the park I would say are being affected by range change,” says Seth Benz. He’s the director of bird ecology at the Schoodic Institute, who’s been supporting the bird recording job.
“We already know, an example would be boreal chickadees, they used to breed in the park as late as the mid-90s. You can’t find a boreal chickadee breeding in the park right now,” Benz says. “Canada jays would come down and winter here; you can’t find them anymore.”
Murray Carpenter
/
Maine Public
And Benz says the forest itself will quickly be various, with a warming environment impacting the red spruce that is plentiful in Acadia.
“And so we’re going to have a drastically different looking forest,” he says. “These birds could be out in front of that change. They are harbingers of change. So that’s why we think this work, not only the recording, but our observational data, is really important for the park.”
Sebastianelli’s recordings are being archived at the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jay McGowan, a task leader at the library, says they are basically audio specimens, that can help to chronicle the development of the park’s environments.
“How did this area sound before it was developed, or before climate change drastically changed the habitat?” McGowan says. “So all of these snapshots in time of the acoustic soundscape are potentially really valuable in ways that we’ve not yet understood.”
Sebastianelli’s recordings likewise help to provide Cornell’s popular birding app Merlin, which assists determine bird types by their calls utilizing a mobile phone.
Murray Carpenter
/
Maine Public
Out on the path, travelers Theresa Cramer and Brian Chevalier inform Sebastianelli they’d been utilizing the app to determine bird tunes on their walking
Murray Carpenter
/
Maine Public
“There was a common raven, the magnolia warbler and black throated green warbler, does that sound right?” says Cramer.
“All of them, yes,” says Sebastianelli.
“We were absolutely attempting to listen for that scream of the typical raven,” says Chevalier.
A couple of minutes later on, Sebastianelli stops to tape the calls of the raven, still echoing out over a salt marsh.
Sebastianelli says she’s positive the recordings will have worth, however acknowledges that it’s tough to state what it will be.
“Who knows what people are going to use this for, you know, what education project,” she says. “Are people going to be like, I wonder what Acadia National Park sounded like 50 years ago? Oh wow. Who knows?”
