It’s 5:30 on an early summer morning, and Laura Sebastianelli is starting off down Acadia’s Ship Harbor Trail. She’s wearing headphones, carrying a digital recorder in a fanny pack, and is aiming a large parabolic microphone–about the size of a trash can lid–in the direction of a small warbler.
“So we’re actually hearing two common yellowthroats, probably kind of counter-singing," Sebastianelli says. "So it’s one male is telling another male this is my territory, and the other saying this is my territory. Likely, I’m not in their head, but.”
In fact, this is also Sebastianelli’s territory.
“For the last, well this is my sixth year, I come here in May and June to record all the vocalizations of the bird sounds of Acadia," she says.
Over the course of a year, Acadia National Park is home to more than 300 species of birds. But as the climate changes, those populations are in flux. To create a baseline for studying that change in the decades to come, Sebstianelli is part of a group of volunteers that are making field recordings of as many species as they can, while they’re still here.
Before Sebastianelli started her field recordings, there were just 58 tracks of bird calls from Acadia National Park archived on tape. Now she and her team have assembled over 1,200, establishing an audio baseline for future researchers.
Earlier this month, she came upon an American bittern, a tall skinny wetlands bird that is in steep decline. It came unexpectedly close, and she was able to capture a clear recording.
“I could see the whole body experience of this bird. It like throws its head up in the air, and it looks like it's snatching an insect, and it does its kind of gulping thing. And it's just, wow," Sebastianelli says. “And to think, these are the stories of Acadia in their own voice. This is their voice telling us the story.”
And part of the story they are telling is about the changing climate, and what it means for wildlife populations.
“Birds in the park I would say are being affected by range change,” says Seth Benz. He's the director of bird ecology at the Schoodic Institute, who’s been supporting the bird recording project.
“We already know, an example would be boreal chickadees, they used to breed in the park as late as the mid-90s. You can’t find a boreal chickadee breeding in the park right now," Benz says. "Canada jays would come down and winter here; you can’t find them anymore.”
And Benz says the forest itself will soon be different, with a warming climate affecting the red spruce that abounds in Acadia.
“And so we’re going to have a drastically different looking forest," he says. "These birds could be out in front of that change. They are harbingers of change. So that’s why we think this work, not only the recording, but our observational data, is really important for the park.”
Sebastianelli’s recordings are being archived at the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jay McGowan, a project leader at the library, says they are essentially audio specimens, that can help to chronicle the evolution of the park’s habitats.
“How did this area sound before it was developed, or before climate change drastically changed the habitat?" McGowan says. "So all of these snapshots in time of the acoustic soundscape are potentially really valuable in ways that we’ve not yet understood.”
Sebastianelli’s recordings also help to supply Cornell’s popular birding app Merlin, which helps identify bird species by their calls using a smartphone.
Out on the trail, tourists Theresa Cramer and Brian Chevalier tell Sebastianelli they’d been using the app to identify bird songs on their hike.
“There was a common raven, the magnolia warbler and black throated green warbler, does that sound right?” says Cramer.
"All of them, yes," says Sebastianelli.
"We were definitely trying to listen for that scream of the common raven," says Chevalier.
A few minutes later, Sebastianelli stops to tape the calls of the raven, still echoing out over a salt marsh.
Sebastianelli says she’s confident the recordings will have value, but acknowledges that it’s hard to say what it will be.
“Who knows what people are going to use this for, you know, what education project," she says. "Are people going to be like, I wonder what Acadia National Park sounded like 50 years ago? Oh wow. Who knows?”
