The Big Year of African Sounds: Filling Africa's Missing Sound Library
You hear a lilac-breasted roller long before you see one. The call is a harsh, rasping shudder, comically at odds with the watercolour plumage that eventually lands in front of you. For anyone birding in Africa, sound comes first — which makes it strange that Africa is the continent where sound is thinnest on file. Fewer than 30% of African bird species have the roughly 150 recordings per species that an identification tool needs in order to learn a voice.
What the campaign is
The Big Year of African Sounds is a 2026 attempt to fix that. Led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and BirdLife South Africa, it asks the continent's birders to record more than 1,800 species across 50 countries, with recordings uploaded to open-access archives — the Macaulay Library and eBird — where they become both training data and research material.
Two purposes, and they are not the same. The first is identification: the popular app Merlin Bird ID identifies birds by sound, and it does it badly in Africa for the simple reason that the data was never collected. The second is science. Vocalizations are evidence of presence, of behaviour and, in bulk, of population change, and automated acoustic monitoring is often the only practical way to survey forest that you cannot walk through.
Why Africa is under-recorded
More than half of Africa's bird species are found nowhere else. A large share of them are forest birds with small ranges and a habit of singing from cover; some are known from a single ridge or a single forest patch. Add the practicalities — recording equipment, travel, permits, spare batteries, the cost of getting to a site in the first place — and you get a continent where the recordist-to-species ratio is the worst in the world.
Then there is the threshold itself. A model needs variety: many individuals, many days, song and calls and alarm notes, because that is what it will meet in the field. One lucky recording of a rarity is worth less to the archive than a solid local set of a bird you can find every week.
Our own catalogue shows the gap
We would rather be blunt about this than imply otherwise. This site holds 1,236 species pages. Only 56 of them carry African range data, and 54 of those are Tanzanian, drawn mostly from the Eastern Arc mountains — a chain of forested ridges that is one of the most important centres of endemism on the continent.
Two of the birds we can play you below, Rubeho Warbler and Winifred's Warbler, have global ranges measured in a few mountain blocks. For species like these, a good recording is not a nice-to-have; it is frequently the cheapest proof that a population still exists, and the most reliable way to know if it is still there in five years. Our Tanzania page lists what we have.
What the campaign has already found
Concrete results are already arriving. Participants made the first known recordings of red weavers in northern Kenya's Boni-Dodori coastal forest — evidence that a species presumed lost in the area is still breeding there. As Cullen Hanks of the Cornell Lab put it, information like that shapes decisions about which places matter for migration and for individual populations. That is the sequence the campaign is built on: you cannot protect a site you do not know is important.
How to take part
The barrier is lower than it looks. A modern phone with a wind shield is enough for loud, close birds; the recording app inside eBird and the guidance at africansounds.org will tell you what counts. Upload with time, place and habitat notes, because a recording without context is hard to use. Chase the dawn chorus rather than the day, work a patch you can return to, and remember that common birds are welcome — a repeatable local series is exactly what trains a model.
The campaign has a WhatsApp channel for news across the continent, and the African Bioacoustics Community coordinates much of the regional effort. If your country has no recordists working in it, the birds in your garden are a legitimate place to start.
Listening to what we do have
Four Tanzanian species from our own archive, including one whose loudest sound is not a voice at all. The African Broadbill's signature noise is mechanical — a snapping, whirring sound produced by its wings in a display flight, which no amount of listening to its throat would explain.