Xeno-Canto: The World’s Largest Open Library of Bird Sounds (10,000 + species )

https://xeno-canto.org/

This is UNREAL stuff - this is an incredible example of what miraculous things can get built if people all over the world collaborate over decades , leveraging technology ...

This is a FREE , open to people, built by people and moderated by people, superbly organized database of calls and bird sounds of 10,000 + species of birds from ALL OVER THE WORLD 

Please do check the website out - you could be sitting in Mumbai - and at a click of a button you can listen to validated call recording of a new species of 'Tinamau' from Brazilian rainforest https://xeno-canto.org/forum/topic/71048

or 

that of a 'Chuck-will's Widow' from Oklohoma https://xeno-canto.org/797414

This project recently completed 20 years - do read the note by the key people behind it 

20 years of XC!

By Willem-Pier Vellinga and Bob Planqué

May 30, 2025

Xeno-canto turned 20 years old the other day, on may 30th ..!

What an adventure. Starting from Neotropical birds, XC now covers birds worldwide, and also grasshoppers and crickets, bats, land mammals and frogs.

Together with all recordists, 11000+ of us now, we've collected close to a million recordings in those 20 years. Wow. One amazing statistic that has held throughout these years is that on average each new recordist has contributed about 100 recordings. So, keep spreading the word!

At the same time there is a large imbalance between the number of recordings shared, with around 10 recordists sharing more than 10000 recordings each. Perhaps it is more interesting that there is a large imbalance in the number of recordings per species. So there is still a lot to record and discover out there.

A short history of XC

Back in 2003, Bob and Willem-Pier had both visited South America several times, doing bird surveys and making sound recordings in the tropics of Ecuador and Peru. They were both grappling with the diversity of birds in these forests. Bob had created a simple program with which a list of qualitative sound characteristics for a set of species could be turned into a decision tree. He put out the word on NEOORN, a web forum on Neotropical Ornithology. He got one reply: from Willem-Pier. The two had both been thinking of ways to make sound recordings easier to navigate. It turned out that WP was working at the TU Eindhoven; Bob was finishing his PhD and had to travel to Eindhoven every few weeks to meet his advisor. The two met there for an hour or so, at which point the idea for a website to share recordings was born.

They then went their separate ways; Bob to the UK to do a postdoc, Willem-Pier moved back to Groningen. Over the next year or so, Bob conjured up a first draft website. Before launching, Willem-Pier and Bob asked Doug Stotz to allow them to use the inimitable Neotropical Birds database as backbone. This is a one of a kind database with details on habitat use, biogeographical and country information for all the bird species in Central and South America. Way ahead of the curve: to this day, no similar database exists for other taxa or other regions. Together with the innovation of a qualitative scoring system of sound characters for bird sounds, the site went live. Sonograms followed soon after. Read all about it in the news of 2005. Practically all development of XC was discussed via email or chat. Willem-Pier and Bob wouldn't meet again in person until about two years later.

XC principles

Although XC has always been about sharing and open source, its principles were first properly written down when preparing for a talk in 2009 at the Brazilian Bird Fair Avistar. So thanks to Guto Carvalho for inviting us over!

Automatic recognition and software tools

XC has been a driver of research on automatic recognition of bird sounds, with over a decade of involvement in BirdCLEF. Most major algorithms (especially BirdNET, Perch, and their off-shoots) have been trained on XC data. For European grasshoppers, we can now also start making inroads. XC has also inspired several software projects, notably warbleR designed to analyse XC recordings.

Unexpected use of XC recordings

XC recordings are used in the weirdest and coolest ways. How about Holger Ballweg's BeakFM, an XC radio, streaming sounds of birds that have been recorded near the current location of the International Space Station? There are also several crowd-funded music albums by Shika Shika in which XC recordings have been prime source material. Their fourth album A Guide to the Birdsong of Migration by Shika Shika is still in the making, and you can support the initiative to make it a reality.

Since it is our birthday, we figure you might wonder if we'd like presents. We do :-) What about finally getting that set on the hard disks in your drawers ready for upload? Or if you do not have those:

Start supporting XC for our 20th birthday!

In these 20 years XC has had huge impact and we would like it to remain as important as it is now.

Among other things that means maintaining and developing the code and IT hardware and initiate, plan and execute XC projects. In those projects XC invests time and effort to make wildlife sounds accessible to everyone. From citizen scientists to conservationists to curious listeners. XC is about improving tools for sharing, exploring, and analyzing sounds, not about chasing clicks or mining user data.

XC has operated on a shoestring budget over the years. You can check our financial records for that.

Of course XC does this together with other organisations, most importantly Naturalis (cooperation and IT support since 2008!!) and GBIF/NLBIF (a number of crucial grants for development). But, at the moment still, most of the work going into maintaining and developing XC is carried out & coordinated by a core group of volunteers that have to liberate time to put in the necessary effort.

XC is not funded by advertising, commercial interests, or corporate mandates. Our priorities are set by the curiosity and fascination with sounds of a global community of recordists, listeners, and researchers. Openness is at the core of XC: anyone, anywhere in the world can contribute to or benefit from this unique archive.

If you belong to that crowd and value the sounds we share here, and value the way we do that, please consider supporting Xeno-canto today with a donation.

• Community support means the team behind XC can keep affording to liberate time to get work done for XC.

• Community support means XC can stay independent, free and open.

• Community support means XC can keep focussing on what matters.

This article was last updated on May 31, 2025 at 07:32

Look within !!!!

 

Repairing ourselves ? : By Santosh Desai

I have been a big fan of Santosh Desai's writing - I think this specific piece is one of his finest ...  

Things get broken. That is the natural order of life. Sometimes they erode gradually, invisibly, until one day they simply stop functioning. On other occasions, there is a sudden rupture, where something snaps. A rupture brings with it its own, unplanned clarity. Something gives way, and there is no going back. The script has suddenly been rewritten. Other forms of damage are slow seepages, barely visible until they have quietly rearranged the ground beneath our feet. Whatever the form, the fact of breakage is central to the human condition. We live in a world where endings happen whether or not we are prepared for them.

Our instinct, almost without exception, is to try and fix things. To reclaim an earlier coherence. To treat the break as an interruption rather than a turning. The urge to repair runs deep and carries with it a kind of mechanical optimism: the belief that anything can be restored to its original shape if we can only find the right tools, the right will. Our quarrel with the idea of breakage lies in this assumption of reversibility. We imagine that it is the duty of things to return to the way they once were.

If repair chases the illusion of the unbroken, healing operates differently. It does not promise a return. It does not promise completion. Repair isolates what went wrong and tries to correct or replace it. Healing does not offer that comfort. The body intervenes when the wound heals; it works with it. When it comes to healing, we need to trust the body’s and mind’s own mechanisms. We need to surrender to time and to nature. A scar appears when healing is complete; not as restoration but as a record. It is nature’s way of making the broken permanent, or at least making memory of it part of what survives. Healing is an organic recovery, not a correction. The crack does not disappear so much as become livable.

This becomes most apparent in the emotional world, where rupture cannot be reversed any more than time can be rewound. A breakup, for instance, exposes us to a form of damage that has no solution. There is no procedure that will stitch things back together; no method by which the earlier sense of self can be reclaimed intact. When healing looks like mere resilience — like the kind we like to celebrate — it is often a much quieter reconstruction. A self-aware acceptance in its barest form. A self-awareness that acknowledges the past rather than trying to bury it. The jagged and often painful process of letting the self arrive at its own understanding, by allowing it to feel what it must, to pass through what it needs to pass through, without being hurried toward a newer or better version of itself.

Rehabilitation sits somewhere in between these two worlds. It works not by restoring what was lost but by coaxing back function, by building strength where weakness has taken hold. Rehabilitation accepts that what was once natural and effortless must now be fought for. The body and the mind have to relearn what they once knew, step by laborious step. It looks the rupture in the eye and deals with its consequences. Here we claw our way back, sometimes to a workable version of ourselves that bears only some resemblance to the original.

 What unites all these responses is the absence of guarantees. And life gives us a lot to practise on. A bitter fight where words are said that cannot be taken back. A partner’s infidelity. A betrayal by a close friend. A breakup that comes without warning. A physical injury that changes everything. The untimely loss of a loved one. These are not experiences with a rewind button. Sometimes the best we can manage is accommodation. Finding a way to live around a fact that cannot be denied, repaired, or fully healed. It remains within us, surfacing at unexpected moments, demanding recognition.

The deepest discomfort may lie in the realization that in many of these cases, there was never anything whole to begin with. That there were always fine cracks that we papered over, that what we thought was solid and stable was always an accident of circumstances. A marriage does not break like glass breaks; it simply stops existing meaningfully in the present sense, and we discover that what seemed permanent was always an arrangement made viable by factors that were never constant. That things were always contingent, and that reality was much slipperier than we gave it credit for in the first place. The wound is not an instrument of rupture, but that of revelation. It helps us find who we always were and exposes us to reality as it always was and not as we wanted it to be. This is why accommodation feels more honest than healing: we are not learning to live around damage to something solid, but coming to terms with the provisional nature of what we mistook for permanence.

As our control over our lives increases, so does our exposure to fragility. Our small deviations from expected trajectories feel amplified because we are so used to having our own way. We have learned to believe that the world must bend to our will, and when it refuses, we are flabbergasted by the universe’s indifference to us.

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Orange-headed thrush and an Acherontia moth on a Bauhinia (By Shaik Zain ud-Din ) @ 1777-1783

 

This painting is part of the ‘Impey Album’

Between 1777-1783, Lady Mary Impey, wife of the recently appointed Chief Justice of Bengal, Sir Elijah Impey, commissioned three artists (all of whom trained in a Provincial Mughal atelier in the neighboring city of Patna) to record the newfound wonders of her Calcutta aviary and menagerie.

'Cikai Koṟṟaṉ came and saw' : In 1st Century AD a Tamilian visited Egypt ..

An Indian ( most probably a trader from Tamilnadu area)  visited the Valley of the Kings in Egypt in 1st / 2nd century AD - and carved his name ( in Tamil Brahmi script ) on the wall of a Pharoh's tomb ! 

Read more at :

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-history/tamil-sanskrit-prakrit-names-egypt-tombs-reason-10528975/ 

होतात त्यांच्या कविता : रंजना बाजी

सुखात, दुःखात, वेदनेत, निराशेत

आनंदात, त्राग्यातसुद्धा एकत्र आलेली मनं

जोडली गेलेली नाती

आतल्या कप्प्यात जपलेली प्रेमानं सिंचलेली

कधी झालेली जन्मांतरीची

कधी उसवून गेलेली

होतात अचानक अनावर आटोक्याच्या पलीकडं

बांध तोडून सुटतात सैरावैरा

पसरतात सगळीकडं

काही नाती, मनाचा ओलावा लपेटलेली

कधी दुरावा सहन करणारी, तरी

कोरडेपणात हिरवाई जपलेली

रुजून उगवतात त्यात शब्दांचे अंकुर

पांढरे काळे हिरवे लाल गुलाबी

काही लुभावने, काही जीवघेणे

येतात एकत्र, बनतात शब्द

उतरतात माझ्या मनातून कागदावर

पोचतात तुझ्या मनापर्यंत

आणि आपसूकच

होतात त्यांच्या कविता

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Selected from ‘100 Tips for a Better Life’ – by Conor Barnes

 Possessions

3. Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.

4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.

 Productivity

17. Done is better than perfect.

Body

22. Exercise is the most important lifestyle intervention you can do. Even the bare minimum (15 minutes a week) has a huge impact. Start small.

25. History remembers those who got to market first. Getting your creation into the world is more important than getting it perfect.

28. You can improve your communication skills with practice much more effectively than you can improve your intelligence with practice. If you’re not that smart but can communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t communicate clearly.

32. Make accomplishing things as easy as possible. Find the easiest way to start exercising. Find the easiest way to start writing. People make things harder than they have to be and get frustrated when they can’t succeed. Try not to.

33. Cultivate a reputation for being dependable. Good reputations are valuable because they’re rare (easily destroyed and hard to rebuild). You don’t have to brew the most amazing coffee if your customers know the coffee will always be hot.

34. How you spend every day is how you spend your life.

Rationality

35. Noticing biases in others is easy, noticing biases in yourself is hard. However, it has much higher pay-off.

39. If something surprises you again and again, stop being surprised.

Self

44. There is no interpersonal situation that can’t be improved by knowing more about your desires, goals, and structure. ‘Know thyself!’

45. If you’re under 90, try things.

46. Things that aren’t your fault can still be your responsibility.

47. Defining yourself by your suffering is an effective way to keep suffering forever (ex. incels, trauma).

48. Keep your identity small. “I’m not the kind of person who does things like that” is not an explanation, it’s a trap. It prevents nerds from working out and men from dancing.

49. Don’t confuse ‘doing a thing because I like it’ with ‘doing a thing because I want to be seen as the sort of person who does such things’

50. Remember that you are dying.

55. Personal epiphanies feel great, but they fade within weeks. Upon having an epiphany, make a plan and start actually changing behavior.

56. Sometimes unsolvable questions like “what is my purpose?” and “why should I exist?” lose their force upon lifestyle fixes. In other words, seeing friends regularly and getting enough sleep can go a long way to solving existentialism.

Hazards

59. Those who generate anxiety in you and promise that they have the solution are grifters. See: politicians, marketers, new masculinity gurus, etc. Avoid these.

 61. It is cheap for people to talk about their values, goals, rules, and lifestyle. When people’s actions contradict their talk, pay attention!

62. “If they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you” and “those who live by the sword die by the sword” mean the same thing. Viciousness you excuse in yourself, friends, or teammates will one day return to you, and then you won’t have an excuse.

Others

67. It’s possible to get people to do things that make you like them more but respect them less. Avoid this, it destroys relationships.

68. Think a little about why you enjoy what you enjoy. If you can explain what you love about Dune, you can now communicate not only with Dune fans, but with people who love those aspects in other books.

70. Bored people are boring.

71. A norm of eating with your family without watching something will lead to better conversations. If this idea fills you with dread, consider getting a new family.

Relationships

73. In relationships look for somebody you can enjoy just hanging out near. Long-term relationships are mostly spent just chilling.

74. Sometimes things last a long time because they’re good (jambalaya). But that doesn’t mean that because something has lasted a long time that it is good (penile subincisions). Apply this to relationships, careers, and beliefs as appropriate.

78. If you have trouble talking during dates, try saying whatever comes into your head. At worst you’ll ruin some dates (which weren’t going well anyways), at best you’ll have some great conversations. Alcohol can help :) 

79. When dating, de-emphasizing your quirks will lead to 90% of people thinking you’re kind of alright. Emphasizing your quirks will lead to 10% of people thinking you’re fascinating and fun. Those are the people interested in dating you. Aim for them.

81. People can be the wrong fit for you without being bad. Being a person is complicated and hard.

Compassion

82. Call your parents when you think of them, tell your friends when you love them.

83. Compliment people more. Many people have trouble thinking of themselves as smart, or pretty, or kind, unless told by someone else. You can help them out.

84. If somebody is undergoing group criticism, the tribal part in you will want to join in the fun of righteously destroying somebody. Resist this, you’ll only add ugliness to the world. And anyway, they’ve already learned the lesson they’re going to learn and it probably isn’t the lesson you want.

85. Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle forms, scammers, or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not.

86. Cultivate patience for difficult people. Communication is extremely complicated and involves getting both tone and complex ideas across. Many people can barely do either. Don’t punish them.

87. Don’t punish people for trying. You teach them to not try with you. Punishing includes whining that it took them so long, that they did it badly, or that others have done it better.

88. Remember that many people suffer invisibly, and some of the worst suffering shame. Not everybody can make their pain legible.

89. Don't punish people for admitting they were wrong, you make it harder for them to improve.

90. In general, you will look for excuses to not be kind to people. Resist these.

Joy

91. Human mood and well-being are heavily influenced by simple things: Exercise, good sleep, light, being in nature. It’s cheap to experiment with these.

92. You have vanishingly little political influence and every thought you spend on politics will probably come to nothing. Consider building things instead or at least going for a walk.

93. Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap. If you dislike poetry, or fine art, or anything, it’s possible you’ve only ever seen the crap. Go looking!

94. You don’t have to love your job. Jobs can be many things, but they’re also a way to make money. Many people live fine lives in okay jobs by using the money they make things they care about.

95. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.

100. Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like ‘news’. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.

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