Andrew Skeoch

Going back to when I was first recording, and I'd be traveling around the country making sound recordings, and I just assumed that being a nature recordist, you have to get up in the morning to record the dawn chorus.

It's just part of the gig, you know.

I'd be spending a lot of time recording dawn choruses.

One of the things that I loved was the aesthetics of the honey to dawn chorus, because each species seems to have a simple little song.

And when you get a group of them all sort of roosting collectively within earshot of each other, you get this

it's a really beautiful dawn singing patterns.

And it's not something that, you know, when I first started traveling overseas, I realized this is a really uniquely Australian thing.

You don't get this kind of sonic patterning in dawn choruses in, say, Asia or Europe.

And so that got me curious about honey to dawn songs.

And I also realized that that patterning aesthetically, pleasingly to the ear,

works because wherever I was in the country, it seemed to be one species that was doing the calling and hence you'd get this one species doing its simple dawn song and you'd get this bouncing of sound in the landscape.

It took me a while for me to sort of pick up on that and confirm that, you know, I think this is a common thing.

This seems to be what goes on.

And I sort of realized that there's a refinement to that, which is that it's not just one species of honey eater that you hear in the dawn chorus.

So what I realized is that honey eaters come in these various sizes, that you get the smaller Melithreptus honey eaters around the country, white napes and black chins and brown headed and so on.

Then you get the Lycanostomus honey eaters, which are the mid-sized green species like the white plumes, and then larger ones, the wattle birds, the friar birds.

There's also the New Hollands and white-cheeked honey eaters, which are in a separate genus, and the white-fronted honey eaters.

So those honey eaters are in a separate group as well.

And what I realized is that in the dawn chorus, you tend to get one of those genuses singing in any one place.

Even though there might be multiple examples of the, say, the Lycanostomus Tanudas in the landscape, it tends to be one that you hear.