ML161651
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Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: Don Kroodsma. Timecode In: 00:03:48. Timecode out: 00:54:37. Notes: Birdsong; Animal communication. Equipment Notes: Split Track Stereo. Show: Don Kroodsma Engineer: Johnny Evans (in studio) Date: 5/10/2005 EA-Elizabeth Arnold DK-Don Kroodsma Split track, DK in LEFT channel, EA in RIGHT. 1:53 EA-So you're getting ready to take off on another trip, right? 1:57 DK-oh, I am, I am, I just need to go west for a month and sample from the Mississippi to the Pacific. 2:03 EA-and will you do the whole stretch? 2:06 DK-Well, its going to be a car and bicycle trip. I am going alone this time so the bike will be on top of the car, and the goal will be to record some of the finest sounds of the planet at dawn and then bicycle for a couple of hours and then move on the next spot. 2:25 EA talks with engineers 3:52 EA-brief intro, then Lets start with how you got into this. What was the catalyst for you to even get into bird song? And just devoting yourself to song? 4:17 DK-I think a lot happens when one is young and desperate and impressionable and I was all of those, I needed a project for a graduate thesis and fortunately 6 months before, someone had slipped some headphones over my head and I heard the magic of birdsong and when I needed that graduate thesis, I recalled that birdsong and one little question led to another. It's a very slippery slope. 4:43 EA-What is it that's just so intriguing about song to you? 4:47 DK-well I think what happens when you take a very powerful microphone, aim it at a bird, and this is a parabolic microphone, you aim it at the bird and that microphone is lifting the song right off the bill of that bird, and when you slip a pair of headphones on and you hear that detail and then you start to ask the simplest of questions, like how is this bird, what song is he singing, why does he have that song, from whom did he learn that song, if you have just a little bit of curiosity you can get totally captured by these birds, just by starting to listen carefully. 5:27 EA-is it the why or is it the what? I mean is it why birds sing or just the sheer intricacy and beauty of how they sing? 5:36 DK-Its everything with birdsong. We can ask, why does this particular bird have a particular song, in other words, what song does it have, why is it singing now, to whom is it singing, what is it about its brain and nerves and those 2 voice boxes that it, why is it control song like that, and in evolutionary time we can ask a simple question like why does a robin sing the way it does? And we trace it back through its ancestors, and so we're interested in the evolution of song, there's so many levels at which we can start to ask questions about bird song, and all so intriguing. 6:18 6:20 EA-even the magpie? 6:22 DK-heh, heh, now that magpie, that magpie is a member of this group of birds we call corvids, crows and ravens and jays, they're song birds, there's a technical group of birds called songbirds, but these are birds that seem not to have a song, they're songbirds without a song. And they are intelligent, and they are smart and good flyers, yes, even the magpie. 6:49 EA-So this is really a passion for you? 6:52 DK-I guess you would call it a passion, some of my friends have accused me of being obsessive, but but to me its just a logical thing that one does when one gets hooked on something. 7:05 EA-what stands out when you think of all that you have learned over this years, is it what you have been able to discern with respect to dialect, or what? 7:17 DK-I think the most satisfying thing that I have learned over a third of a century is simply how to listen. And its simply being connected with the world around me, its walking anywhere, its listening to any one individual bird, and if you simply pause and listen, you hear th... (Notes truncated)
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- Cataloged
- 3 Jun 2010 - Ben Brotman
- Digitized
- 3 Jun 2010 - Ben Brotman
- Edited
- 3 Jun 2010 - Ben Brotman