The 2009 AWSRG Workshop which was held between 6-11th September at Gundabooka National Park, near Bourke, NSW, was an event that will doubtless be fondly remembered for years to come by participants.

The months of hard work put in by the organising team - Andrew Skeoch, Gayle Johnson, Howard Plowright, and Bob Tomkins - in selecting and securing the venue, discovering local caterer Samantha Mooring and husband Garry who provided tasty "bush style" meals and refreshments for the duration, and not least putting together a fantastic program of presentations was rewarded with a five days of workshops, recording, socialising and relaxing that ran without a hitch.

Gundabooka National Park was in peak condition after heavy rainfall earlier in the year. The result was that there was widespread flowering of eremophila and wildflowers throughout the region. This in had turn attracted numerous nomadic bird species to enjoy the bountiful resources - Black, Pied, Painted and Striped honeyeater, Cockatiel, Budgerigar, Red winged Parrots and Major MItchell Cockatoo were all seen in good numbers around the Belah shearers quarters providing ample opportunity for birdwatching and photography for the non-recordists in attendance.

In all 22 AWSRG members, partners and friends attended the Workshop, including four United Kingdom based members. One new AWSRG member made a long trek from Western Australia by plane, train, bus and automobile to reach the workshop venue, whilst many others drove from NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

The following short audio clip from a recording made by Paul Jacobson gives a taste of one early morning soundscape at Gundabooka. Prominent are Grey Strike Thrush, Black Eared Cuckoo, Horsfields Bronze Cuckoo, Crested Bellbird and Rufous Songlark.

As a bonus feature for Steve Abbots' "Bird Brain" podcast series the producers interviewed a number of sound recordists whose call recordings were used on the BOCA A Field Guide to Australian Birdsong CD's and featured in the series. All the bonus interviewees are AWSRG members.

The interviews can accessed as an rss feed by clicking the following link:
http://www.abc.net.au/local/podcasts/birdbrain.xml

The individual interviews can be accessed on the ABC website using the following links:

Howard Plowright

Birdbrain bonus interview with Howard Plowright

Fred van Gessel

Birdbrain bonus interview with Fred van Gessel

Vicki Powys

Birdbrain bonus interview with Vicki Powys

John Hutchinson

Birdbrain bonus interview with John Hutchinson (part 1)

Birdbrain bonus interview with John Hutchinson (part 2)

David Stewart

Birdbrain bonus interview with David Stewart

xeno-canto.org, a shared community database of bird sounds, has recently announced that they will soon add an Australia, Oceania and New Zealand section to their site.

xeno-canto.org currently has databases for The Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia and it's success is attested to by the remarkable feat of reaching 5000 species recordings on New Years Eve, 2008.

One of xeno-canto.org's founders, Bob Planqué, has contributed a brief background on the xeno-canto.org project and what we can expect the Australia, Oceania and New Zealand section to offer;

What we're planning to do is open a new branch on xeno-canto for Australia, Oceania, New Zealand. Functionality of this branch will be very much like the other ones except Americas. For the Americas we have some additional background data that allows us to build more features. But to get an idea of what that Australian branch would look like and do, just have a look at one of the other branches. In any case, it will feature full search capabilities, sonograms for all recordings (made automatically by us), searching through recordings using country information (i.e. searching through all species from a country, not all recordings from that country), sound characteristics, etc. It will have a forum, a mysteries page, Google Maps, integration with BirdLife, Avibase, etc.

Recordings are all shared under a Creative Commons License, which in particular allows sharing with some of our partners. E.g., we are financially supported by Naturalis, the national museum of Natural History here in Holland, which has a strong Asian tradition. They want to include xeno-canto recordings in some of their future websites. This is covered by the license.

We are planning to have a working site in a month or so (Feb-March 2009 ed.). It won't need much work other than putting the species list into our system (we use BirdLife's taxonomy and country info), adds some lines of code, and we're done.

We'd very much appreciate if some of the Australian recordists would contribute... To contribute, people have to become a member (it's free, and entails nothing but giving us name, email address and password), after which you can upload songs, revise songs, chat on the fora, etc. We accomodate many kinds of contributions, especially if it concerns a lot of material. We have built a batch upload system where people can upload big zip files. Others have sent CDs, minidiscs, CD-ROMs, and so on. As long as it's in digital form, we can handle it.