Francesc Kirchner from ORYX interviews Stanislas Wroza, on the occasion of his new book.
Stanislas Wroza is an european specialists in bioacoustics applied to ornithology.
The past years he has been working for making this discipline more accessible to ornithologist enthusiasts through his blog, soundbirding.org, and with the publication Les Oiseaux par le Son in 2019, his first book, a practical manual for learning to record the birds, as well as to choose the appropriate material and to analyze the recordings. As well as now with the publication of his new book.
He is currently the project manager at Observatoire National de la Biodiversité, a member of the Commission de la Avifaune Française and of the editorial committee of the French magazine Ornithos.
Your new book “Identifier les oiseaux migrateurs par le son“ can be considered a new kind of field guide with a new approach to bird identification. After dozens of books describing birds basically from a sighting approach, your field guide gives much more importance to a listening approach. Why did you decide to write a field guide with that new approach to birding?
Most of the time, you will hear a bird before you see it. Bird calls have always been the preferred approach to identifying birds. In recent years, bioacoustics has become very popular among the birdwatching community. Many birdwatchers have started to use new tools such as sonograms to improve their listening skills. Yet, until now there hasn't been any comprehensive guide that describes calls of European birds. I could feel a genuine demand for a guide that would help birdwatchers to identify birds by ear.
What is your appreciation about the actual knowledge level of the average birder about voices of birds? Do you think that this aspect is the great pending subject among birders?
I think that there's a clear disproportion between our level of knowledge about visual criteria and how much we know about bird sounds. Shorebirds are a ridiculous example : most field guides will give you a list of extremely difficult criteria about their plumage and overall structure, which require to age birds and describe bird moult. It takes years of practice to understand how to identify a Sandpiper. Yet, most of them are very vocal and can be easily identified by their calls.
Other than your two recent books, the one mentioned and Les oiseaux par le son, could you tell us other interesting initiatives at a European scale that are also trying to make more popular to pay attention to the birds calls?
The Sound Approach team has made a lot to democratize bird calls, including several books that read like novels. Many birdwatchers are getting involved into "nocmig", which means recording bird migration at night and identifying them only by their calls. There are several networks that gather those new kind of data at regional (www.ornitho.cat) or european (www.trektellen.org) scale. The website xeno-canto.org is a wonderful tool to listen to bird sounds everywhere in the world.
Coming back again to your book, can you explain very briefly, what kind of new information will find the reader in respect to a more typical bird field guide?
The reader will find the most important visual critera for a field identification, many pictures of birds in flight and informations about the migratory behaviour (where and when it can be seen) for each species. But most importantly, he will find a complete description of the main types of calls that can be heard for each species, with annotaed sonagrams that help memorizing them and provide objective criteria for a sound identification.
If one of your readers wants to make a step further in the world of bird voices, what kind of new equipment would you recommend using, other than the binoculars?
I would recommend purchasing a recorder (such as an Olympus LS-P4, Olympus DM-720, Zoom H5 or Tascam DR-05) plus an external omindirectionnal microphone (these latter are very cheap but incredibly helpful to improve the sound quality of the recorder : something like a Primo EM 272). I provide many pratical advice about sound equipment in my first book Les Oiseaux par le Son that is a kind of introduction to sound recording.
In the same sense, what would you recommend changing in their birding habits?
Be curious! There are many other approaches to birding than looking into a scope. Listen for birds at night, go into reedbeds or coastal bushes on a sunny day and pay attention to any sound coming to you. Look at the sky in autumn and listen to the Wagtails, Pipits and Finches flying over. Start recording sounds that are new to you and make your own "sound library" so that you will learn faster.
The new Stanislas Wroza's book
