Wildlife sound recording as a profession, craft and science has only been around for a little over 100 years. It started in 1889, when 18-year-old Frankfurt-born Ludwig Koch made the first wildlife recording of a White-rumped Shama Copsychus malabaricus. The first recording was made with a phonograph ‘Edison’ cylinder (the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound). That was followed by years of ‘unserviceable’ recordings, as he and others experimented. They broke through in 1926 with the arrival of an ‘electrical recording system with the use of the microphone’. In 1929, Koch was employed to head up the Cultural Department of a German subsidiary of the EMI gramophone company and his career as a wildlife sound recorder was underway.
Koch had a powerful backer. In 1936, Hermann Göring (a bird lover) paid for his flights when Koch went on a lecture tour of Switzerland. After his last lecture, Koch met the Nazi’s representative in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff. The next day Gustloff was assassinated and Koch, fearing that he would be implicated (he was a Jew), fled to Britain.
Within months, Koch was writing with Max Nicholson, who would become Director General of the Nature Conservancy and longstanding editor of British Birds. Sir Julian Huxley introduced Koch to publisher Harry Witherby and in 1936, Songs of Wild Birds was published, Britain’s first ever sound-book about birds, complete with vinyl discs. The publication was followed rapidly by two other sound-books, More Songs of Wild Birds (1937) and Animal Language (1938). It took over two weeks just to get a recording of a Green Woodpecker Picus viridis.
Early in World War II, Huxley introduced Koch to the BBC, and he soon became familiar to listeners. His sound recordings were acquired by the BBC and established their library of Natural History Sounds. Koch retired in 1951, but he continued to make expeditions to record wildlife sounds, visiting Iceland at 71. He was described by BBC Presenter Sean Street as being ‘in his time, at least as famous as Sir David Attenborough is today’.
Recording bird sounds
Right up until the 1990s, at least outside of North America, bird sound was largely neglected, in both its vital role in identification, and in its popularity and accessibility. At this time, there were only two or three resources for bird sounds globally: The British library of Wildlife Sounds, the collection made by Jean C. Roche, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and their publications. The Roche collection had no publicly accessible dates or locations listed. The British Library was under-resourced and years behind.
Birds of the Western Palearctic contained sonagrams and earnest descriptions of vocalisations, but reader-friendly attempts to convey bird sounds were lacking. The Americans were changing all that, and the publication of Warblers (Borror & Gunn 1985) containing three vinyl albums or a two-tape packet accompanied by a booklet revolutionised the way that bird sounds were recorded and described. Every recording had a year and month, a place and a number, a sonagram, examples of geographic variation and genuinely useful descriptions.
Sound recording birds became popular in the UK in the first decade of the Millennium, largely in line with the development of digital technology towards the end of the decade. Rapid technological developments have made learning and recording bird sounds more accessible, (think about advances in microphones and cameras, the switch from CDs to cloud-based sound platforms, or the launch of the Merlin Bird ID app). The use of a mobile phone as a handheld microphone, video recorder, field guide, camera, bird news service and now even analysing bird sounds, would be unthinkable to birders as recently as fifteen years ago.
111 years after the first bird recording was made, Mark Constantine teamed up with Arnoud van den Berg and Magnus Robb to form The Sound Approach, to create their own accurately documented bird sound library. In that time, The Sound Approach has amassed 83,170 high-quality bird sound recordings across 1,500 species – just 20 species from the Collins Bird Guide (2023) are missing. 46,184 of the recordings were made by Magnus; 28,988 by Arnoud.