Like a progressive rock Percy Thrower, ‘Big Jake’ showed how responses could be produced from wild birds by impersonating their calls. Nowadays field birders are more likely to use digital recordings to elicit the same reaction.
75 : Big Jake Calls the Waders
1980
Like a progressive rock Percy Thrower, ‘Big Jake’ showed how responses could be produced from wild birds by impersonating their calls. Nowadays field birders are more likely to use digital recordings to elicit the same reaction.
The popularity of Ludwig Koch and Max Nicholson’s early forays into commercial wildlife vinyl record releases launched the commercial viability of bird song recordings in particular, though now such recordings tend to be birder-specific rather than bought by the general public. Over time, bird vocalisations have been released on all the major recorded media, with vinyl records, cassettes, 8-track cartridges, compact discs and downloadable MP3s all being available to bird aficionados.
A few key recordings have been influential or notable in the formative history of many birdwatchers. HMV’s Bird Recognition: an Aural Index series of EPs (1965), recorded by Victor C Lewis, gave many birders a handy reference to the sounds of a lot of our most common birds, while the oil conglomerate Shell, in the guise of Shell Nature Records, put out nine 7-inch EPs covering a fairly comprehensive slice of the British avifauna from 1966 to 1969 in its British Birds series. Witherby’s Sound Guide to British Birds (1969) carried the calls and songs of 200 species on its two 12-inch discs.
For the serious student intent on actually learning bird songs and calls, the only option in the late 1960s and 1970s was the music cassette, largely because a tape could be listened to in the car or at home, and later on a portable cassette player, with or without headphones. Consequently, series like the popular Teach Yourself Bird Sounds became a pivotal purchase in many a nascent field birder’s career.
At the turn of the 1970s two relatively comprehensive multiple disc series of European bird songs were released: The Peterson Field Guide to the Bird Songs of Britain and Europe (1969-1973) was launched as an unwieldy 14-disc reference set, while Jean-Claude Roché’s now fairly ubiquitous Western Palearctic recordings were issued on a 15-disc 10-inch set and at least two five-record sets. The quality of Roché’s recordings has resulted in them still being available today. Cassette and vinyl sets were released for all the continents around this time, though their quality and comprehensiveness was variable.
Some recordings are remembered by birders for their novelty value. One such disc, here symbolising the genre, was Big Jake Calls the Waders (1980), a vinyl LP of wader call imitations by well-known birder Jake Ward, who is still part of the birding scene today. With its protagonist on the cover resplendent in early Seventies’ knitted headwear and resembling a minor progressive rock keyboard player, the record has plenty of kitsch appeal even now, though it never claimed to be an essential educational aid.
Notwithstanding some descriptive errors in the original accompanying literature, the 2,817 recordings of 819 species in Bird Songs of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East by Andreas Schulze and Karl-Heinz Dingler (2003) were the European birder’s avian Rosetta Stone early on in this century, available initially on CD and then MP3. But the fast-spinning evolution of digital technology means that even these masterly recordings have now been overtaken. The ease with which amateur and professional field recordings can be uploaded to websites and blogs has enabled the Xeno-canto website (www.xeno-canto.org) to completely dominate the field for birders needing an accurate collection of bird recordings for almost any destination on the planet.
This Dutch online archive is an open-source, searchable collection of the world’s bird calls and songs, and at the time of writing held 158,598 downloadable recordings of 8,886 species. Soon the site, which is free to use by both recordists and visitors, may well hold recordings of virtually every species and subspecies on the planet. A world away from Big Jake and his shorebird impressions, it is an invaluable and irreplaceable resource for birders and ornithologists everywhere.