MAINE PUBLIC • June 23, 2023
“This is my sixth year. I come here in May and June to record all the vocalizations of the bird sounds of Acadia," Laura Sebastianelli says. Over the course of a year, Acadia National Park is home to more than 300 species of birds. But as the climate changes, those populations are in flux. To create a baseline for studying that change in the decades to come, Sebstianelli is part of a group of volunteers that making field recordings of as many species as they can, while they’re still here. Before Sebastianelli started her field recordings, there were just 58 tracks of bird calls from Acadia National Park archived on tape. Now she and her team have assembled over 1,200, establishing an audio baseline for future researchers.