Linguistics and Ethno-ornithology: Bird songs and bird stories from the Western Province of Papua New Guinea

In 2012 and 2013 I travelled to the Western Province of Papua New Guinea as part of a linguistic and ethno-ornithological documentation team. During these trips the team conducted many early-morning bird walks. These walks were an engaging, natural elicitation environment for collecting fluent, unscripted language as well as carefully pronounced target words. Armed with a head-mounted microphone attached to our main language consultant, a shot-gun microphone to capture birdsong from a distance and a pack of eager local bird spotters, the team collected hours of birdsong and ethno-ornithological and linguistic content.

This video is a sampling of these experiences. Submerge yourself in a soundscape of these early morning bird walks across the savannah lands and around the freshwater swamp forests of remote Papua New Guinea. Hear the birdcalls and learn the Nen names for birds such as the Greater Black Coucal (tibrom), the Pinon Imperial Pigeon (qébti mémék), the Mangrove Gerygone (sañ dnär), Zoe Imperial Pigeon (wk dédir), the Trumpet Manucode (boaboa), the Raggiana bird-of-paradise (kakayam), the Grey Shrike-thrush (kokopasi), the Large-tailed Nightjar (drondro), and many others. Woven together in this video are photos, videos, audio soundscapes, birdsong, short stories in the Nen language, and visualisations of acoustic data.

The video has six parts (or chapters), starting with an introduction situating the viewer geographically and auditorily. The next chapter is a short account of the multilingual bird, sañ dnär, and the languages it can 'speak'. The next two chapters are short narratives that offer English and Nen subtitles. The first one is called A Story of Tibrom in which our Nen language specialist Jimmy Nébni discusses the bird's role in waking people up in the early morning hours, harkening back to the times of head-hunters in the region. The second narrative is called A Story of Zo. Here Jimmy recounts a tale of the clever zo and how it protects its food storehouse from the threat of fire. The next chapter shows a moving sonogram of birdsong. A sonogram, or spectrogram, is one method of visualising the acoustic signal of bird vocalisation, plotting frequency by time. The sonogram in this video was generated using Raven Lite. As the audio of birdsong plays, I highlight the frequencies and note the birds that are producing the calls, allowing the viewer to follow along. This is first played at normal speed, then again at a slower speed to allow for more information about the birds to be accessed by the viewer. The final chapter is the outro in which I present our participants and mention those who have funded this documentation project.

In between each of the chapters, I have included four short interludes. These are 60 seconds each of birdsong with offerings from the online Nen dictionary, created by Nicholas Evans, which was built upon the recordings and interviews from these and earlier field trips to Bimadbn Village. In addition to the dictionary entries, I offer two linguistic spectrograms of human speech, in which Jimmy pronounced the names of two birds, drondro and qébti zir. These spectrograms were generated using the Praat software.

All recordings generated from this documentation project can be found at the Language Archive, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (see below). These recordings have become a very rich corpus of materials that can be used by linguists, ethno-ornithologists, anthropologists, and importantly, the materials have been and are continuing to be repatriated to the language communities in meaningful ways.