Recording the Araripe Manakin, With Gerrit Vyn

Near the city of Crato in northeastern Brazil lives a critically endangered little bird — the Araripe Manakin. It’s a little larger than a sparrow, it’s beautiful, and it lives on the slopes of a very small area in the Araripe Plateau. And because the Araripe Manakin wasn’t discovered until the late 1990s, it’s relatively unstudied. Gerrit Vyn of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is on a mission to capture a “clean” recording of the Araripe Manakin — one without human-generated noise in the background. Will he succeed?

BirdNote^®
Recording the Araripe Manakin, with Gerrit Vyn
Written by Dominic Black from recordings by Gerrit Vyn

This is BirdNote.

Near the city of Crato in northeastern Brazil lives a critically endangered little bird — the Araripe Manakin. It’s a little larger than a sparrow and it lives on the slopes of a very small area in the Araripe Plateau:

…and along these slopes, it’s pretty heavily populated and so almost all of the recordings that exist of this species have dogs or roosters in the background, or music…

So Gerrit Vyn of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s on a mission to capture a clean recording of this bird.

Alright so I’m getting my gear together before I head off on this trail. I’m gonna pack a bag full of camera gear. Important things are sun block, always…I’m gonna have a parabolic microphone and then a stereo microphone set up for recording…I got a little notebook here…there’s quite a few highly venomous snakes here so I got these snake proof gators that I’ll zip up to my ankles…

SO here we go, off we go into the forest.

Alright so I’m in a area where I heard a mankin singing up ahead of me, so I’m going to drop my gear here get my parabola hooked up and start trying to record…

[Song of the Araripe Manakin]

The critically endangered Araripe Manakin, recorded by Gerrit Vyn of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. For BirdNote, I’m Mary McCann.

[Song of the Araripe Manakin]

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Field recordings by Gerrit Vyn. Editing and mixing by John Kessler and Dominic Black.
BirdNote’s theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Dominic Black
© 2016 Tune In to Nature.org February 2017 Narrator: Mary McCann

ID# ARAMAN-02-2016-02-02 ARAMAN-02

(http://www.xeno-canto.org/species/Antilophia-bokermanni - first recording)