Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Home
Today's Show: Wandering Albatross Molt
Wandering Albatross flying low over the water, it's long gray wings stretched out, white body held horizontal, pink beak
Listen In
  • Today's Show
  • Listen
    • Daily Shows
    • Threatened
    • Grouse
    • BirdNote Presents
    • How to Listen
  • Explore
    • Field Notes
    • Sights & Sounds
    • Birdwatching
    • Resources for Educators
  • How to Help Birds
    • At Home
    • In Your Community
    • Success Stories
  • About
    • The BirdNote Story
    • The Team
    • Partners
    • For Radio Stations
    • Funding
    • Contact Us
    • FAQs
    • Support BirdNote
  • Donate

Searching for the Araripe Manakin, With Gerrit Vyn

A stunning bird that’s critically endangered
Subscribe to the Podcast
Download
  • Share This:
  • Share to Facebook
  • Share to Twitter
  • Share to Email
Araripe Manakin
© Rick Ellis Simpson - FCC

Gerrit Vyn is a sound recordist for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He recently traveled to northeastern Brazil’s Araripe Plateau in search of the Araripe Manakin, a beautiful white bird with dark wing-tips and tail-feathers — and a deep red hood. The Araripe Manakin is critically endangered, in part because of its limited range. But, as Gerrit observes, human activity also threatens the bird’s survival.

  • Full Transcript
  • Credits

BirdNote®
Searching for the Araripe Manakin, with Gerrit Vyn
Written by Dominic Black from audio recordings by Gerrit Vyn

This is BirdNote.

It’s about 7am, and I’m jumping in the car in Crato, Brazil, to head up to try to get some recordings of Araripe Manakin… 

Gerrit Vyn is a sound recordist for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the bird he’s looking for is a stunner — about the size of a chunky sparrow, white with inky dark wing-tips and tail-feathers and a deep blood-red hood. The Araripe Manakin’s critically endangered, in part because it lives mainly in an incredibly small area of northeastern Brazil’s Araripe Plateau:


So literally I can see the entire species’ range from a hilltop here. It’s along the slopes and usually associated with springs. There’s a lot of natural springs here, and it supports the vegetation they like and the foods they like and the females like to nest, literally with their nests hanging over these small creeks in the tropical vegetation.    

Besides it being such a limited range, there’s also a very high demand for this water so a lot of the springs have been degraded, and a lot of them have most of their water extracted from them. So protecting these last springs that support these birds is critical for their survival. 


Which is partly why recording the Araripe Manakin is such a big deal. Tomorrow we head into the woods with Gerrit Vyn of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to capture one of the first clean recordings of this critically endangered bird.

For BirdNote, I’m Mary McCann.

###

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 2016/December 2017         Narrator: Mary McCann

ID#     ARAMAN-01-2016-02-01       ARAMAN-01

Gerrit Vyn
Guest
Dominic Black
Writer
Mary McCann
Narrator
Support More Shows Like This
TagsAmazon Brazil endangered species human interaction photography recording tropical South America

Related Resources

Araripe Manakin – More at BirdLife InternationalListen to the companion show about Gerrit Vyn’s efforts to record the Araripe M…Learn more about what it takes to record the world's birds in this extended pod…

More About These Birds

Araripe Manakin (Antilophia bokermanni)

Sights & Sounds

Related Field Notes

March 10, 2016

A Tale of Hummingbird Etiquette

By Beth Surdut
Artist and writer Beth Surdut listens to ravens and has paddled with alligators in wild and s
September 22, 2014

Biking Thousands of Miles ... for Birds

By Adam Sedgley
 11,500

Birds connect us with the joy and wonder of nature. By telling vivid, sound-rich stories about birds and the challenges they face, BirdNote inspires listeners to care about the natural world – and take steps to protect it.

Support BirdNote

  • Daily Shows
  • Field Notes
  • BirdNote Presents
  • Sights & Sounds
  • About BirdNote
  • Contact BirdNote
Sign up for our newsletter!
  • BirdNote on Facebook
  • BirdNote on Twitter
  • BirdNote on Instagram

Copyright 2021. All rights reserved.

  • Privacy Policy