Songs editor
Jasper Wynn is a bioacoustician and field recordist. He edits the Songs section and runs Roost's sound archive.
Beats
Habitat
Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been a working migrant trap for a century and a half. The cemetery model is being quietly replicated, with varying success, in cities across the eastern United States.
Songs
Inside the predator-fenced sanctuary of Zealandia in Wellington, the tui has recovered to densities not seen on mainland New Zealand in over a century. Jasper Wynn records its strange, mechanical, mostly inaudible song.
Citizen Science
Every February, hundreds of thousands of people count birds for four days. Jasper Wynn examines what such a brief survey can and cannot show.
Migration
What a single juvenile godwit named B6 told a research team about the absolute limits of non-stop migration.
Endangered
In central Victoria, a species reduced to roughly three hundred wild individuals is losing not only its numbers but the cultural inheritance of its dialect.
Songs
The Veery's spiraling, descending song has long been a puzzle. Recent work has shown the bird sings two simultaneous notes from its two-sided syrinx, producing the harmonic blur that gives the song its character. Jasper Wynn explains.
Backyard
From the first April male at the willow bud to the last October female at the salvia, the ruby-throated year in a single Massachusetts yard.
Species
At 4:42 a.m. on May 14, in second-growth hardwood above the Greenbrier River, the first hermit thrush of the morning began its phrase. The recorder caught it cleanly. The bird had been there for nine days.
Songs
Jasper Wynn spent four mornings in May at a 32-acre stand of mature beech and tulip poplar in Centre County, Pennsylvania, recording the assembly of voices that begins twenty-eight minutes before sunrise and finishes, mostly, by six fifteen.
Field Reports
The Pt. Sur sailed at 6:45 a.m. into a four-foot swell, bound for the Soquel Canyon edge and the species that work it.