Torpidsforhal

23/12/2024

Recordings of past soundscapes aren’t available from most sites. We needed to develop a way to reconstruct historical soundscapes so we could track how they’ve changed over time.

To do this, we used annual bird monitoring data collected through European and American bird surveys in over 200,000 sites across Europe and North America. These surveys, undertaken by a fantastic network of volunteer ornithologists during late spring and early summer, generate lists of which species, and how many individuals, were counted in each site each year it was surveyed.

We translated this data into soundscapes by combining them with sound recordings for individual species downloaded from Xeno-canto, an online database of bird calls and songs.

First, we clipped all the downloaded sound files to 25 seconds. Then, starting with an empty five minute sound file, we inserted the same number of sound files for a species as there were individuals counted. That means that if there were five individuals of a given species counted in the survey, we inserted five 25-second sound files of that species.

20/12/2024

A 6.5-sq-km island set some 40km off Iceland's northern coast, Grímsey is the country's northernmost inhabited point and the only sliver of Iceland located within the Arctic Circle. In many ways, this frigid far-flung isle cast off a frigid far-flung island nation is Iceland at its most elusive and extreme – and therein lies its appeal.

18/12/2024

18/12/2024

Churchill is known as the polar bear capital of the world. Every year, the Hudson Bay - on the western edge of which the town is perched - thaws, and forces the bears on shore. As the freeze sets in in Autumn, hundreds of bears gather here, waiting.

"We have freshwater rivers flowing into the area and cold water coming in from the Arctic," explains Alysa McCall from Polar Bears International (PBI). "So freeze-up happens here first.

"For polar bears, sea ice is a big dinner plate - it's access to their main prey, seals. They're probably excited for a big meal of seal blubber - they haven't been eating much all summer on land."