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Best Bird Sounds: Our Favorite Macaulay Library Audio Recordings 2025

In 2024, birders uploaded more than 470,000 sound recordings to the Macaulay Library archive. Here are some of our favorites from the year.

The incomparably beautiful voices of birds can be so many things: sweet, evocative, ethereal. Haunting or daunting; weird or funny. And often mind-blowingly complex. So after wrapping up our Best of Macaulay photo essay, we turned our attention to some of the best sound recordings submitted to the archive over the last year. This focus on sound is fitting: the Macaulay Library began life as the Library of Natural Sounds, in 1929, and for its first 70+ years its focus was mainly on audio.

Archived sounds can be notable in so many ways: they can capture a simple moment of beauty from a familiar species. Or perhaps they showcase the vocal acrobatics of a master songster. In still other cases, a recordist’s flawless technique allows listeners to pick out the finest details of a sound. To best appreciate these recordings, we recommend playing the videos below and watching the spectrogram scroll past as you listen. Spectrograms are visual representations of the sound, and when you get the hang of reading them, they allow you to notice minute details. (More on how to read spectrograms.)

Beautiful Sounds

One of the best reasons for recording bird songs is simply to capture the beauty that birds create with their voices. Granted, some birds can be loud, harsh, grating, or monotonous and still be fascinating—but in this category we’re celebrating some of the more mellifluous:

Western Meadowlark by Laura Gooch. The clear, fluting whistles of Western Meadowlarks add a warmth to the grand, wide-open spaces these birds call home. This recording beautifully captures the quick, precise rise-fall-rise of the meadowlark’s song as it floats across the grassland. The recordist was able to approach the bird without disturbing its natural singing behavior, and she used a parabolic microphone to highlight the bird’s voice while keeping other songsters (like a persistent Spotted Towhee) in the background.  

The slender, business-gray Sandhill Crane matches its graceful silhouette with an equally evocative voice. We love the way this call (recorded by Julia Plummer) seems to ripple and echo through the bottomland. In the spectrogram, the stacked horizontal lines in the first note of each call are harmonics that help add extra layers to the bird’s complex bugling sound. These calls are sometimes given en masse by large flocks migrating high in the sky; other times by one or two individuals courting in a picturesque bog or wet prairie.

The White Bellbird is a tropical fruit-eating bird in the cotinga family that spends much of its time in the forest canopy. Courting males produce explosive, bell-like notes that rank as the loudest sound in the avian world. But if you’re lucky to get close enough, as Brazilian recordist Arthur Gomes did, you can appreciate the way this marvelous song quickly modulates to a higher pitch, takes on a metallic quality, and ends on a few whimsical, fluting flourishes.


Virtuosic Singers

The sweet flutelike notes of a meadowlark or thrush are beautiful in their simplicity. Other birds are more into a “wall of sound” approach, capable of lightning-fast riffs that span octaves and layer on harmonics, all while retaining pinpoint control of each note.

Olive yellow-green bird with a sharp bill, gray feathers and tail, and a red eye, perches on a plant.
We love the cascading tinkle of notes and precise, doubled downslurs in Jaden Salett’s recording of New Zealand Bellbird (not related to White Bellbird). Image by Christopher Stephens / Macaulay Library.
A dark-headed bird with a golden underside, and longish, sharp bill, perches on a bush and sings.
This Yellow-rumped Marshbird strings together warbles, trills, and harmonics into improvised songs that can last 10+ seconds. We’re amazed by the quick switches between harsher trills (dark parts of the spectrogram) and precise whistles (cleaner lines on the spectrogram). Recorded by Ricardo Mitidieri; photo by Pablo Re / Macaulay Library.
Black-faced bird with a yellow head and chest, white underside and dark wings, holds a piece of grass in its bill and perches on top of a woven grass hanging nest.
Known for weaving intricate nests out of grass stems, weavers are also accomplished songsters. This Baya Weaver, recorded by Vyom Vyas, delivers a long series of trills and slurs. We love listening to those buzzy notes (starting at 00:03) that seem to simultaneously rise and fall in pitch—created by the bird singing different notes from the two sides of its syrinx, or voice box. Photo by Albin Jacob / Macaulay Library.
Chocolate, bronze and green iridescent bird with a long tail and long, curved bill, perches on a plant.
The brilliantly iridescent sunbirds are sometimes thought of as the Eastern Hemisphere’s answer to hummingbirds. This Bronze Sunbird, recorded in Rwanda by Harerimana Joachim, shows their voices can dazzle, too. We love how fast this bird strings together its main rising-and-falling syllable and periodically adds high, spiraling flourishes without breaking stride. Bronze Sunbird by Tiago Guerreiro / Macaulay Library.

Capturing Natural Moments

Beyond demonstrating an animal’s vocal chops, sound recordings can also capture astonishing moments of natural history, particularly when accompanied by detailed field notes. These three recordings caught our ears for different reasons: one features a key stage in a bird’s vocal development, another conveys the scale of a loud flock, and a third captures a sense of place.

Brown-backed bird with white and black patterned body, perches on a branch and sings.
This remarkable recording, by Roselvy Juárez, captures a young Banded Wren while it is still learning its song. The young bird is experimenting with the notes it will sing as an adult, though they are more variable, wandering, and jumbled in their delivery. Compare it to the simpler, more precise delivery in a typical adult song. Photo by Peter Kondrashov / Macaulay Library.
Seven black, white and gray large birds in flight.
The din created by a big flock of waterfowl, swelling and ebbing in the distance, is a memorable sound. This recording, by Leo Wilhelm, nicely evokes the scene of hundreds of Barnacle Geese settling in for the evening. Barnacle Goose by Lars Petersson / Macaulay Library.
Furry cinnamon and gray bird perches on a rock with mouth open.
The Macaulay Library archives more than bird recordings. These emphatic squeaks, recorded by longtime contributor Wil Hershberger, come from an American pika—a hardy mammal that is virtually synonymous with talus piles and scree slopes of high mountains. Photo by David Kingham / Creative Commons, Flickr.

Exemplary Recording Technique

What makes a great recording? The Macaulay Library offers basic guidelines for sound recording. Really great technique comes from patience, practice, and keen observation in addition to good equipment. If capturing these wild sounds appeals to you, we recommend taking How to Record Bird Sounds, an in-depth course from the Cornell Lab’s Bird Academy.

In capturing the explosive song of this Olive Whistler, recordist Ramit Singal used pretty much flawless technique. The clear white background of the spectrogram is a result of using a parabolic microphone to exclude background noise and focus attention on the singing bird. The recording is generously long, and there’s no extraneous noise from shifting positions, moving the microphone, shuffling feet, etc. Close your eyes, and you could almost be in that Australian forest with the whistler singing only a few meters away.

This Bachman’s Sparrow sings a deceptively simple-sounding song, but thanks to Natasza Fontaine’s excellent recording we can really appreciate what makes it special. The original recording is 9 minutes long, allowing time to appreciate the leisurely pace of the song as it rings out through the pine flatwoods understory. A parabolic microphone isolates the bird from background noise, so a listener can appreciate the nearly endless variety the singer pulls off given the simple building blocks of its song. Watching the spectrogram really helps appreciate the subtle shifts in tone that this bird puts into each rendition of its song, never exactly repeating itself.

Excellent recordings are often easy to spot: the spectrograms show well-defined, dark streaks of voice against a clean white background that’s free of noise, as in this Black-throated Sparrow song by Gavin Aquila. Capturing a recording this clean requires good equipment and quiet recording technique, plus enough field knowledge to approach the bird closely. A recordist can only partially compensate for distance—they can raise the microphone gain to boost the signal, but this will also create distracting background noise. On the other hand, approaching closely without proper care can cause a bird to start making agitated notes or alarm calls. In this recording the bird’s relaxed delivery indicates it wasn’t disturbed, while the clean spectrogram allows listeners to appreciate the fine variations in tone and phrasing the sparrow mixes in.

Persistence and patience are key traits for a skilled recordist. Persistence to get to the right location at the right season and time of day for a species, and then patience to capture it vocalizing at length and in suitably quiet surroundings. Longtime recordist Claude Chappuis demonstrated both these traits in this 1983 recording of a Yellow-streaked Lory, from Papua New Guinea. It’s one of only four audio recordings of this species in our archive—added in 2024 when the Macaulay Library was fortunate to acquire more than 11,000 previously unarchived recordings from Chappuis’s six-decade career.

Thank You

The Macaulay Library’s collection of natural history media from around the world would not be possible without the dedication, passion, and generosity of birders, photographers, and recordists around the world. Audio recordings in particular are an essential part of our Merlin Sound ID feature—it takes more than 100 recordings of each vocalization type to train the sound ID model. Your work not only documents the beauty of birds and wildlife, it also serves as an invaluable resource for scientists, educators, and nature enthusiasts around the world.

This year’s “Best of Macaulay Library” collection is a celebration of your commitment to capturing the magic of the natural world and sharing it with others. From all of us at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, thank you for helping share the world of birds and wildlife, one upload at a time.

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American Kestrel by Blair Dudeck / Macaulay Library