BALMORAL -- It's the male birds that sing and it's mating that turns them into little Pavarottis.
But it was a threat to habitat that transformed birds here into recording artists.
Balmoral bird lover Catherine Thexton uses a parabolic microphone to record her feathered friends singing their hearts out.
Aluminum maker Alcan wanted to build a smelter near Balmoral, 30 kilometres north of Winnipeg, and one of the comments people kept making was "at least there's nothing up there."
"I thought, 'There's lots up here,' " said Catherine Thexton, who lived on a farm in the area with her late husband George. To prove it, Thexton would venture into the bush on their Interlake farm and record bird sounds.
The Alcan plan was scrapped but a recording industry was launched. Thexton's first vinyl record, In Praise of Spring (1981), sold more than 1,000 copies, followed by Meadowlark Music (1983), also on vinyl, which sold more than 7,000 copies.
The birds, not to be confused with The Byrds, were a hit.
Thexton continued to release tapes and CDs, her latest a five-CD set called Bird Song with Ambient Sound -- bird calls and songs from 122 species in Manitoba, plus field notes. The voices include 13 different species of warbler, 13 different sparrows, six woodpeckers, five vireos, and the onomatopoeic whippoorwill.
Her recordings are in the British Library in London, England, and she has been written up in a British journal published by the Wildlife Sound Recording Society.
Most of us are imbeciles when it comes to using our hearing with any skill and intelligence. A profusion of bird sounds is gibberish to us.
Not to Catherine. "We've got a house finch just singing away out there," she said, interrupting the interview. Later, while leaving her old farmyard, she announced that "the song sparrows are really going to town."
Her hobby means she doesn't have to see the birds to know what's around her. "You walk into a woodland and you know who's there."
While ecological awareness has grown since Thexton opposed the smelter, one type of pollution continues to spread: noise pollution.
"So many peoples' hearing is getting duller from all the noise around. There's so much noise today," she said.
This, at a time when bio-acoustics, including sounds made by fish (not just whales) and insects, is enjoying a resurgence of scientific study.
Another of Thexton's recordings, Dusk to Dawn, sounds as if it's about all-nighters at a drive-in theatre. It came about after many nights when Thexton would lie in bed with the screen window open and wonder what bird and animal sounds she heard.
For example, she wondered if the "pahh" sound was an owl or a fox. (Naturalist writer Ernest Thompson Seton encountered the same dilemma. In his case, he determined it was an owl only after he killed the owl and found the noise stopped.) Dusk to Dawn includes the red fox and various species of toads, frogs and night owls.
With her parabolic microphone, shaped like a satellite dish, Thexton looks more like someone trying to intercept extraterrestrial signals. The apparatus amplifies sound 75 times for her recordings, but she has to pinpoint a bird's location. Even then, birds don't speak on cue.
She and husband George became so friendly with the barn swallows on their property that the birds would occasionally fly in and out of their house. Most smaller birds on their yard learned the couple were not a threat and were protection, since larger birds like hawks avoid people.
Thexton studied conservation in Ontario in 1944 and 1945. She was a teacher for 20 years and introduced the first full course in ecology in a secondary school at St. John's High School in 1976-77.
Thexton, now 87, is hesitant to name her favourite birds. "There's a song, 'When I'm not near the one I love, I love the one I'm near.' That takes in just about all birds," she said.
Rudolf Koes, Manitoba Naturalists Society bird expert, said Thexton's CDs is the only tool of its kind for identifying birds specific to Manitoba. "In some cases, identification by sound is crucial. There are birds you rarely see but hear more frequently," he said.
Thexton's CDs are available at Fort Whyte Centre and sometimes at Oak Hammock Marsh, and can be ordered through the website at www.prairiehabitats.com.
bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca
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