The Sound Approach aims to popularise birdsong and the understanding of birdsong. The organisation owns one of the largest privately-owned archives of bird sound recordings in the world, exceeding 83,000 recordings of more than 1,500 species, with a particular focus on the Western Palaearctic Region. They are an independent award-winning publishing house, with six self-published books and multiple scientific papers.
Driven by his passion for bird song, Mark Constantine, founder of Lush Cosmetics, formed his own independent publishing company in 2006 committed to his vision of turning birdwatchers into bird-listeners. Since 2000, Mark Constantine, Magnus Robb and Arnoud van den Berg have been building a major new collection of bird sound recordings. In 2015, The Sound Approach were awarded the BTO Marsh Award for innovative ornithology, and in 2008, Petrels Night and Day was awarded Birdwatch Book of the Year.
The Sound Approach aim to popularise birdsong and raise standards in the use of sounds in bird identification. Subjects of particular interest include ageing and sexing birds by their sounds, and recognising hidden biodiversity, ‘new species’, through bird sounds. Besides those of the three main recordists, The Sound Approach collection has also received major contributions from Dick Forsman, René Pop and Killian Mullarney.
Achievements and awards
Recording bird sounds has brought multiple benefits to ornithology, most predominantly in taxonomy and the science of bird identification. In 2016, the contribution of The Sound Approach to ornithology was recognised by the BTO, with the presentation of The Marsh Award, following the (re)discovery of two species of owl, one of them virtually a new species for science.
‘The first discovery was Arnoud’s doing,’ said Magnus. ‘We asked, half in jest, if he would record some fish owls in Turkey. There had been about five records in a century, so that was a tall order. However, Arnoud and Cecilia duly found some, and this kickstarted the rediscovery of the Turkish Fish Owl and the realisation that this taxon, also occurring in Iran, sounds distinct from the Brown Fish Owls of the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere.’
‘Then in Oman,’ Magnus continued, ‘I was studying Pallid Scops Owls when I heard an unknown Strix owl. This ‘Omani’ Owl turned out to be the same species as a single tatty specimen from Pakistan, described by Allan Octavian Hume in 1878 as Strix butleri. It was clearly different from the owl widely and erroneously known as Hume’s Owl, which was duly renamed as Desert Owl S hadorami.’
There has also been ground-breaking science carried out on sounds of seabirds. ‘We almost decided not to bother with petrels and shearwaters,’ laughed Magnus. ‘Who ever hears them? Then on a trip to Tenerife, I visited a valley where Cory’s Shearwaters breed. I was awe-struck and became an addict, collecting sounds of all the Western Palearctic breeding species of Procellariiformes. The result was Petrels Night and Day.’
‘Among its achievements was to set out clearly the different vocal repertoires of four geographically and seasonally separated populations of Band-rumped Storm Petrels in the Western Palearctic. It also helped to define differences between the sounds within several less familiar species-groups, such as Fea’s, Desertas and Zino’s Petrels or British and Mediterranean Storm Petrels.’