Research
Ancient sound revival
Once upon a time, Ngā manu tātākī (the cacophony made by New Zealand bird calls) echoed throughout the hills of Wellington, New Zealand. As time passed, deforestation and introduced species silenced these sounds. Today, thanks to world-renowned conservation efforts undertaken by many nature advocates, Ngā manu tātākī is slowly returning to Wellington!
To improve our understanding of what factors may be limiting a faster recovery of ngā manu (New Zealand birds) in Wellington we have recorded over 20,000 hours of audio throughout the city. You can help us working with state-of-the-art machine learning to automatically identify the calls of ngā manu from all this audio. You don't need to be an expert! You can help us in various ways: reporting the presence of any bird call, identifying bird calls (available soon) or validating computer-classified calls (available soon).
We will use your classifications to generate maps of where ngā manu are in Wellington. Combining the birds' location with the type of vegetation, abundance of predators, and human disturbances we can guide better conservation efforts to revive the sounds of ngā manu in New Zealand cities and towns including the coolest little capital in the world!
Our research on the media
NZ Herald
This Way Up, Radio New Zealand
Google blog
Click, BBC Radio
One of the bird song recorders used to collect the audio.