Scope

The Macaulay Library has over 170,000 audio examples from 75% of the world's bird species, not to mention insects, fish, frogs, whales, and more. The video collection includes 60,000 recordings from over 3500 species. With approximately half of these already digitized and available through our online archive, there are a lot of examples to choose from to explore topics like geographic variation in chickadee sounds or courtship displays in birds of paradise videos.

Our unique marine collection also boasts over 5,000 recordings of seals, whales, fish and more. You can use our sound visualization software to calculate the speeds of sound in air and water, as we do in a high school physics lesson, or examine the soundfrequencies fish can make by grinding their teeth versus rapidly expanding their swim bladder.