Photos by Tristan Hutchinson
As comprehensively as recorded sound has served humankind with a panorama of emotion, expression, and experience, and as much as we sometimes wrestle with the question of its value amid difficult times, there are moments when you are reminded of the importance of sound to life, the earth itself, and its preservation.
Hailing from Cóbh, County Cork, Ireland, ornithologist Seán Ronayne is the field-recordist and producer behind the Irish Wildlife Sounds project, currently in the process of completing a collection of calls and sounds from all known regularly-occurring bird species on the island of Ireland, capturing 194 out of some 200—63% of which are red- or amber-listed, in danger of extinction.
Released in May of this year, the project’s first long-player, Wild Silence, is a collection of field recordings relaying the sounds of nature in some of Ireland’s furthest reaches and remotest locations, driven by Ronayne’s quest for purity of sound and circumstance in archiving the sounds of these landscapes and their inhabitants. 25% of proceeds from sales of the record go to BirdWatch Ireland, the largest independent conservation organization in Ireland.
Having garnered public attention at the outset of 2024 for his endeavors in Ireland, Ronayne, alongside partner, Alba Novell Capdevila, is the subject of Birdsong (2024), a documentary directed by film-maker Kathleen Harris that provides a portrait of his recording and production processes, his life and relationships in light of an autism diagnosis at the age of 32, and how his neurotype informs his practice. Additionally, Ronayne’s upcoming book, Nature Boy: A Memoir of Birdsong and Belonging will be on Irish shelves on October 10, and is available for pre-order.
In this conversation, Ronayne gives us an introduction to his work, the context in which it occurs, and his advice for others seeking to rekindle a relationship with nature and the environment around them.
Talk to us about where your interest in natural sounds began in the first instance, and how you remember developing and growing—not only with regards to perception and your ability to identify birdsong, but also that body of knowledge that attends.
Both my father and my grandfather were very much interested in nature all their lives. When I was born, I was really hyper, restless. I used to cry a lot at home, and my parents discovered very early on that as soon as they brought me out into the countryside, down to Cuskinny Nature Reserve in Cóbh, that I would transform. I would stop crying, I would be looking all around me, and I was just enthralled with nature.
In the very early days, when I was, y’know, one or two, my father would imitate the sounds of all of the birds, the mammals, and even the likes of the bees around us. In the beginning, I would just laugh at them, but then later on in life, when I could start to speak, I started to tell him what he was imitating. So, I guess it was like a guessing game, but it was also an indirect way of teaching me to engage with nature. From those moments, it just flourished in me and I brought it with me throughout my life in all different ways.
As I grew older, one by one, I learned to identify every bird by ear. When I was a teenager, I could identify every bird in Ireland by ear. I went on to study zoology in University College Cork, specializing in birds; I did a Master’s in marine biology, specializing in birds; I did a Master’s in ecological impact assessment, specializing in birds. I began to work with birds, doing bird surveys using my ear.
Then I moved to Barcelona, having met my partner Alba in [Cork superpub] the Old Oak. There were so many new birds that I had never experienced before. The first six months of our living there, I just went birding every single day until I knew the birds completely by ear over there also.
But to help me do that, because I needed to do it quickly to regain work in my field, I bought an Olympus LS12 on eBay for €90, and every time I went out, I would bring it with me. If I heard something that was unfamiliar to me and I couldn’t figure it out in the moment, I captured the sound of it and I brought it home and identified it. That was the beginning of my sound recording journey.
Then it really took off in a very strange way. I went to the Delta Birding Festival in a place called the Ebro Delta, in the very south of Catalonia. It borders Valencia and it’s famous for growing the rice for paella; and because of that, it’s full of freshwater lagoons, and as a result of that, it’s full of birds. They have the festival there every year; it’s like a big gathering of ornithologists from all over the world, and they’ve [got] guest speakers, authors, and all kinds of people related to birds and wildlife.
One of the speakers was a guy called Magnus Robb, an interesting guy. He’s a classically trained musician, he’s composed lots of stuff for the BBC, but he’s also an ornithologist, so he combined his incredible ear with ornithological output. And there’s a strange connection in LUSH Cosmetics. The CEO of LUSH Cosmetics is a guy called Mark Constantine, who is also an ornithologist, a birder, who has always had a fascination with bird sound. He was frustrated with the fact that there was no European collection of bird sounds for him to go to to learn from so he hand-picked a team of people to travel around Europe and eventually the world to collect all the birdsongs of the world, and they created a series of books called The Sound Approach, which was instrumental. It was such a pivotal series of books in ornithology, because that’s when people really began to look at the intricacies of bird sound.
Magnus Robb was a member of The Sound Approach, and he was giving a talk at the Ebro Delta about capturing the sounds of nocturnal migration. I was fascinated by that, so I asked him, ‘Do you think I’d be able to capture the sounds over my balcony in Barcelona?’ This was during Covid, actually.
I put this recorder on my balcony at nighttime, I pressed record, and in the morning I would analyze it on Audacity, and I realized that there was a whole migratory flyway just happening right over my head at night. Flamingos, little bitterns, and bee-eaters, night herons, coot, moorhen, water-rail, and all these kinds of really habitat-specific birds were flying right over the heart of Barcelona while I slept. So then I started to venture out and started to sound record all the different birds of Catalonia. This was when I really fell in love with sound recording.
Your current mission is to record the call of every native bird species in Ireland. What can you tell us about the current state of birdlife in Ireland, in the context of ongoing biodiversity loss and climate change, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing Ireland’s wider environment at present?
I came home to Ireland, and I guess I was feeling a little bit deflated, having come from Catalonia, where you have real, true, meaningful wilderness in the likes of the Pyrenees and the various national parks that were there. Back home, essentially, it’s a jigsaw of intensively managed cow fields, conifer plantations, drained bogs, gardens, and urban space. We have less than 1% native woodlands, the lowest in Europe. We’ve lost more wetlands than any other country in the world, 90%, in the last 300 years. And I thought to myself, like, ‘How? How can I be happy as an ornithologist after coming from the Pyrenees, to this?’
So I decided to sound record every bird in Ireland to keep me occupied, originally, and to keep me focused, but then it became a lot more than that. When I was seeking out these birds and seeing the damage on the ground but also the beauty of these birds, it became more of a project related to sharing this beauty with people and showing them what it is that we still have and what we can save, and then to also spread the awareness of the damage that’s been done to our land.
63% of our native bird species are at risk of extinction, red- or amber-listed. Red is critically endangered, and amber is somewhere in the middle—they’re en route. The biggest threat to our birds is the intensive agricultural system that we’ve developed here. It’s one large cow factory, isn’t it? Then you’ve also got the conifer plantations, which are not forests; they’re a commercial crop. It’s a non-native plant, planted in very dense rows where no light gets in, they’re also highly acidic, and they only support a few generalist species, much less than what our native woodlands would support. They’re also planted in very sensitive habitats.
For example, look at the hen harrier. Hen harriers are now down to 85 confirmed pairs in the wild in Ireland, and probably the biggest cause of that is the fact that conifer plantations were planted in the uplands, and hen harriers are ground-nesting birds. They were planted on dry heath and bog, which is where the hen harriers’ nest is on the ground. Once those conifer plantations go in and they mature, that’s it, there’s no more space for those hen harriers. Hen harrier is an Annex One protected species under EU law, so it’s a European priority species. Because that’s Annex One protected, we as a nation are obliged to designate SPAs—special protection areas—for our Annex One species, and of all the SPAs that we’ve designated for hen harrier, it’s estimated over 50% of the land cover within them have been planted with conifer plantations. This is just a snippet of what’s happening.
Many people view Ireland as the Emerald Isle, and it has this wonderful image, which is clearly put together for touristic purposes to generate income, but it’s based on a lie. I think that until people realize and accept this, we can’t move on and make meaningful change, and so that’s what this project became—about sharing the beauty and also bringing awareness to the changes that we need and that we can make.
In that context, talk to us about how you’ve planned and gone about your different field recordings to that end over the past few years… There must be a titanic amount of detective work on sites, locations, and the wider body of knowledge on habitats. What has it taken to assemble this body of work?
I’m trained as an ecologist, first of all, so I’d have a pretty broad understanding of habitats in Ireland because of that. I’ve always had an interest in nature, not just birds, so anything that I passed that was unknown to me, I always wanted to understand what it was and understand the mechanisms behind it. Whether it be otter poo, an insect, a butterfly, a plant, a habitat—I always wanted to understand it.
I first looked up a website called Xeno-Canto, it’s an online encyclopedia of bird calls. People can upload their bird sounds to it and then it’s verified by experts, so you know that what bird you look up is the bird that it says it is. When I filtered that for Ireland, there were very few species recorded, and species as common as house sparrow and mallard were not sound recorded and uploaded, so I knew that there was a lot of work to do.
It was a fun challenge. In the beginning, it was easy, because I was starting from scratch, every bird was a new bird. But as time went on and I had mopped up all of the easy, garden birds and common rural birds, I had to start planning. So I was left with birds that were really rare, really silent, really elusive, or sometimes a combination of all three.
Because of the fact that they were rare, I needed to apply for licenses to the National Parks and Wildlife Service. They had to see the value in what I was doing and give me a license to go and sound-record [the birds] because of the fact that they’re sensitive breeding species, and they would often have to come with me, they’d bring me to a specific location, they’d give me a certain window of time to go in and out so I didn’t disturb [the birds]. Then I would have to think about timing, what time of year would be best, when is my best chance to get vocalization… It’s often during the breeding period, when they’re displaying. I had to time it well. I also had a film crew with me towards the end, so it also had to align with all of those people. Sometimes, it was tricky.
And for the species that were very silent and very elusive, I had to use long term deployments. An example of that is the golden eagle. There’s only a handful of pairs in the country, they’re very rare. They became extinct in the early 1900s or late 1800s, and they had to be reintroduced. They’re very silent, they don’t really vocalize away from the nest, and they’re also extremely far-ranging. A bird could get off from Donegal and fly over to Scotland, feed, and come back. So now, it’s all three: silent, elusive, and rare. So, how do you predict that? How do you record that?
So we got speaking to NPWS staff up in Donegal, which is kind of the stronghold for them, and they knew of a deer carcass that an eagle had been frequenting and eating from. We went there—obviously the bird wasn’t there—and I hid a microphone very close to the carcass, and I also hid a camera trap. Six weeks later, it was collected. I went through the images on the camera trap for it, to see if an eagle did appear and trigger it, and there was no eagle, so I thought, ‘Okay, this was a dud.’ Sometime later, when I had more time, I went through the audio, and actually, there was an eagle. What had happened was, it didn’t land because a peregrine came in and attacked it, and you could hear the peregrine and the golden eagle fighting in the audio. That was the first-ever sound recording of a golden eagle made in Ireland. So that’s an example of how I got around some of the more difficult species.
For those of us that are unfamiliar with the process of field recording for nature, talk to us a little bit about being in that moment, your process of listening out, how different sounds reach you, and reacting/responding in the moment to different environmental changes and stimuli.
For me, birdsong comes first. I’ve got two frequencies in my brain, the bird frequency and the human one. The bird frequency takes priority, always. That gets me in a lot of trouble, always has done. If someone is talking to me and a bird starts to sing over them, my brain switches instantly. Doesn’t matter what they’re talking to me about. People who know me understand it, people who don’t know me might think it’s rude, but I can’t help it. [laughs]
When I listen to birds, I’m analyzing constantly: What’s going on here? Is this song different from the one, two streets down? Are they song-sharing? Song-sharing is a form of local dialect where birds in a particular area will repeat phrases, popular phrases, that I guess are cool to sing in that area. It’s the local tune, so I’m listening out for that. Is there any interesting mimicry of other species it’s heard? Blackbirds will often mimic curlew, mimic lots of different species, so I’m listening for mimicry, to hear for clues as to what it’s experienced. Is it alarming? Why is it alarming?
There’s a hundred and one questions firing in my brain as soon as I start to listen. In that sense, that’s why I’m not there when I’m talking to someone. I’m gone, I’m in another world. But also now, I start to see the sounds because of the fact that I’ve spent so many years now analyzing sonograms. As soon as the sound comes into my brain, I start to see it. It’s a pretty dense process, but it’s automated, y’know, it’s not ‘tasking’ to me. It’s just something that happens.
Talk to us about that process, of going through longform field-recordings and “spectrum-scanning,†for lack of a better term, for what you’re looking for after the fact? What is the process of identifying, isolating sounds, et cetera?
I had two broad methods for this project. One was in-person, where I got short, distinct snippets of a song that I heard live, and then the other part of the process came from these long-term units. I had two permanent units that were running for three years, recording every single night of the year and into the first few hours of the morning. Those were the real heavy-duty parts. I really enjoyed it, actually, and it became… Well, it became an obsession, it was my life for three years.
I would do what I had to do during the day, my bird surveys, which at the time were my bread and butter, but at nighttime, I would start the analysis. I’d spend some time with Alba, have our time together after work, and then I was upstairs, I was into the room, and I would be there until one, sometimes two in the morning, trying to get through this data. I would open each night in full, say, 10 pages of Audacity, each one an hour long.
I’d open my notebook, I’d have three clickers—y’know, like the bouncers have on the door [of a venue]—and I would start scanning, I would start zipping through it. In the very, very beginning, I didn’t recognize sonograms, but over time, a lot of the birds would repeat themselves, so you’d get the same familiar old faces in the sonograms, you would learn them, so it became a very automated visual process.
I wasn’t using my ear, I was using my eye, and as a result of this, I’d have two screens, one screen in front of me, and on the screen on the left, I’d have a podcast or something like that on. I would get lost in it. I would go into a total mode of hyperfocus; sometimes, Alba would come out and have to pull me away from it. That’s how I got through so much data. It wasn’t a chore at all, I looked forward to it; in fact, I had to tell myself to stop. Because of that, I would quickly catch up. Every time I would collect the data, it would be, say, six weeks—and I would often get through those six weeks in one week.
It built up an enormous amount of data. I would count every single call of every species and timestamp it. So with this, I now have three years of constant monitoring data of birds as they’re migrating and calling at night, so I can get all kinds of things from this. I can guess how many species are moving over a given area, when does this species start to migrate, when does it peak, when does it leave, any windblown vagrants…
I mean, I’ve had a few extreme rarities… A semipalmated plover, which is a North American shorebird, was the first-ever record for Cork. It was interesting, actually, because people doubted this at first because it was such an unusual way of intercepting a bird like that. They said, ‘How can you be sure? If you’ve never seen it, and you’ve never heard it, all you have is this recording from three in the morning.’
I think people were a bit dubious of it, but then, about a month later, it was found in the flesh on the site. I think there’s only a handful, like four or five records, for all of Ireland ever, in history. So, it’s very interesting.
This brings us to Wild Silence, which is a selection of soundscapes taken from your archives, and mastered for release by Sean MacErlaine, who is one of my favorite curators, producers, etc. in Irish music. Talk to us about what you set out to accomplish with Wild Silence, and how you went about selecting or curating recordings for people to have.
Wild Silence—it sounds rather ironic in a sense, because, y’know, these tracks are far from silent, they’re bursting with life. The ‘silence’ here refers to my constant search for a lack of anthropogenic noise interference. When I record a bird or a habitat, if I hear the drone of a motorway, if I hear an airplane, anything related to us and any of our mechanical sounds or even domesticated animals, dogs, cats—the track is no good to me. I don’t feel it. So that’s where the “silence†comes from. I was seeking proper wild habitats in combination with a lack of human-made noise. That’s the foundation of the album.
I found myself, for a period, working from home as an ornithologist writing bird reports, which I never wanted to do. I was kind of boxed into it, and I was really unhappy because I’m not an indoors person, and I was constantly pining to be outside. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could transport myself to these last fragments of joy and habitat in Ireland?†I realized that wasn’t possible because those tracks didn’t exist, so I said, ‘Hold on a second, there’s something in this.’ That’s when I decided to start recording longform tracks in the purest wild spaces I could find in the country.
It’s also a testament to the beauty of these places, these last fragments of hope, that I want people to listen to. I would love it if there were more of these spaces, so it’s important to me to make people aware of how beautiful these spaces sound, especially when they’re free from that road noise that so many of us hear all the time, but I guess have blocked out and often don’t realize we’re listening to. To have that contrast, and to hear what these habitats really sound like when they’re free from: that is special.
These longform tracks were more typically recorded with a Zoom F6 and a stereo set of clippies, EM272s. I would just set it down with a power bank, and I would just let it be. I would find my spot, and I would let it record, and I would walk away, go do a bird survey or do whatever I had to do for a few hours, and come back. Then I would have my pick, be able to pick the cleanest, most beautiful parts of [those recordings]. I guess it’s a collection of dawn choruses and coastal seascapes, the sound of the sea, from different locations.
The Birdsong documentary aired recently on [Irish state broadcaster] RTÉ One, and helped bring attention and awareness to both the album and your mission. What’s been the reaction/response from home/abroad, and how do you feel about it, as a representation of your process?
The response has been beautiful, and it’s been far greater than I ever anticipated, to be honest with you. I know that people who do what I do, ecologists or ornithologists, of course we’re aware of the problems around us because this is what we do, and sometimes you take it for granted that other people know that, too.
But of course they don’t, because how are they to know of these intricate issues? The important thing to me was to make members of the public aware of what’s going on. These are the people who have been approaching me and saying things like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so beautiful,’ or, ‘I never realized that this was the case, or that was the case, thank you for highlighting this and for making us aware of this,’ and that’s the important thing.
Ecologists and ornithologists are a very niche minority of the population and we need the voice of the public to help change things for the better, and I think that’s what’s happening. At times it’s been overwhelming because I definitely like my own space, I’m usually alone, and that’s through choice. It’s not that I don’t like people, I just prefer to be alone in nature and doing my own thing.
For those of us who are struggling to reconnect with nature or the world around us for whatever reason, internal or external, what advice can you give in terms of points of access, “tuning in,†I suppose, for lack of a better term, and what people can do now to start forging those connections?
I think it’s quite a simple action that anybody can take and it’s just stop, look, and listen. It’s really that simple. Sometimes, when I’m stressed and I’m walking in the woods, I mean walking really fast, I realize to myself, ‘I’m not really taking anything in.’ So, sometimes, I just stop where I’m at. I stop, and I just… let nature come to me. And then you start to see and hear things that have been all around you all this time that you are bypassing because of the fact that you are stressed and panicking and rushing.
Sometimes, I just sit down, and I listen, and I look. For example, in my garden… we don’t really have a garden as such because it’s a communal area, but the border, I’ve allowed nature to take back control—with a little bit of help because of the fact that it was a lawn, when it grew out, I had to pull out some of the grass to make space for the wildflowers to seed themselves. And now, I have just a tiny little strip, but it’s full of things like lots of different wildflowers, thistles and foxgloves, great willowherb, cut-leaved cranesbill…
When I’m stressed at home writing, answering emails, and doing invoices, I go outside in my bare feet and I just stand there and I watch. I see the ladybirds moving, the hoverflies landing, and it’s another world. It completely, completely lifts my anxiety. And this is just as a result of connecting with the land around me, and the nature that’s right at my feet. No matter where you are, there’s always nature, there’s always something of wonder and mystery that can engage your brain, and take it away from this madness that we’ve created in the world.
Stop, look and listen. But really stop, and really look, and listen. And I guarantee you, I guarantee anybody that’s reading this, will feel a positive change.
