Chirps and songs as indicators of ecosystem health: Yale Climate Connections

Transcript:

Wildlife researchers often spend a lot of time looking through binoculars or monitoring images from trail cameras.

But Elizabeth Znidersic of Charles Sturt University in Australia prefers to listen.

Znidersic: “I first started to become very interested in sound when I was working on secretive marsh birds. So you usually don’t see these birds, you only ever hear them.”

So to monitor the birds, she placed sound recorders in the marsh. And she found that during a major flood, the Australasian bittern stopped performing its mating call.

Znidersic: “Now when that water level dropped back down, which was slightly outside of their breeding season, the birds started to call.”

So researchers could tell that the birds had shifted their breeding in response to the flooding.

She says it’s just one example of how documenting the sounds of the natural world – before and after extreme weather – can help people understand how species are responding to climate change.

And it can help them monitor how the ecosystem comes back after a disaster. So if needed, they can take steps to restore an ecosystem, to make sure it not only looks like it used to – but that it sounds right, too.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media