TBL Podcast - The Big Year of African Sounds: The Story So Far

In this week's episode we are going back to a project that we first spoke about right at the beginning of the year, the Big Year of African Sounds.

The idea behind the project is simple, but incredibly important. Africa has some of the most remarkable birdlife in the world, but when it comes to sound recordings, many of our species are still poorly represented in major sound libraries.

So this year, birders across the continent have been encouraged to get out into the field, press record, and help build a much stronger library of African bird sounds.

And a lot has happened since we first spoke about the project.

The number of recordings coming in has been impressive, training events have taken place across the year, including a recent event at Zaagkuilsdrift, and changes to Merlin and eBird have made it much easier for ordinary birders to get their recordings into the system.

But we are not at the end of the year yet.

So today I am joined again by John Kinghorn, Avitourism Manager at BirdLife South Africa, to look at how the Big Year of African Sounds has gone so far, what they have learned, where the gaps still are, and what birders can still do during these final few months of 2026.

Visit our online store to get your birding related merchandise at great prices https://www.thebirdinglife.com/online-store

Intro and outro music by Tony ZA https://soundcloud.com/tonyofficialza

Links from show:

Big Year of African Sound website http://www.africansounds.org/