Australian Bird Calls

The album came from an idea by Anthony Albrecht, a PhD student at Charles Darwin University and co-founder of the Bowerbird Collective, and his supervisor Stephen Garnett, who wrote the report The Action Plan for Australian Birds 2020, published in December 2021, which found one in six (216 out of 1,299) Australian bird species are threatened.[5] Garnett's report, released in collaboration with BirdLife Australia, further identified 50 species of Australian birds closest to "facing extinction due to lack of policy support and rampant climate change".[2]

Violinist Simone Slattery, the other co-founder of Bowerbird Collective, arranged the first track, a collage of the 53 bird songs recorded by David Stewart over four decades.[6] Slattery said she kept listening to the isolated bird calls until a structure came to mind "like a quirky dawn chorus. Some of these sounds will shock listeners because they're extremely percussive, they're not melodious at all. They're clicks, they're rattles, they're squawks and deep bass notes."[6] The Guardian noted the "morse code-like song" of the night parrot, which had not been heard until 2013, as well as the call of the regent honeyeater, a bird now considered "so rare that it is literally losing its own voice out of loneliness".[6]

BirdLife Australia CEO Paul Sullivan called the album "some rare recordings of birds that may not survive if we don't come together to protect them. While this campaign is fun, there's a serious side to what we're doing, and it's been heartening to see bird enthusiasts showing governments and businesses that Australians care about these important birds."[2]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
The Music	[7]

A staff writer at The Music gave the album four-and-a-half out of five stars and posted a review consisting entirely of bird noises.[7]

The album debuted at number five on the Australian ARIA Albums Chart dated 13 December 2021, selling over 2,000 units, with 1,500 of those being pre-ordered copies.[6] The following week, it ascended to number three.[8] It later re-entered at number two.[9]

• Official website