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The Reel Thing: The Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics Celebrates 50 Years of Recording Animal Sound

Fifty years ago, when Donald Borror began hauling his sound recording equipment around the fields, woodlots and marshes of Ohio to capture bird-song; it was an adventure akin to going on safari. Sound equipment and tape recorders were heavy and cumbersome—portable in name only. 200-ft extension cords had to be plugged into a car; you could go just as far as your car and that cord could take you.

But at the time, this was cutting-edge equipment, just declassified by the government after World War II. Bioacoustics was a brand-new concept and then-Entomology Professor Don Borror seized the opportunity to capture the songs of the birds he loved.

He, with colleague Carl Reese, was a pioneer, particularly in electronic sound analysis. Borror was the first to show that the unique structure of certain birds' vocal apparatus, such as the wood thrush, allows them to produce two songs simultaneously. Borror's work also documented variation in song types used by many species of song birds.

Their quest to analyze sound led Borror and Reese to Ohio State's Department of Astronomy where research was being done to correlate star scintillations with weather conditions. Variation in star scintillation was analyzed with an instrument called a sound spectrograph. Adapting this instrument to their own needs, Borror and Reese published their results in 1953—the first avian sonogram published in the United States. A new discipline was born and the sonograph became the workhorse of bioacoustics analysis.

For years, Borror augmented the lab's budget by selling his recordings and donating the proceeds to benefit the lab. Today, the laboratory that bears his name is the second-largest of its kind in North America, with more than 23,000 animal sounds preserved on tape. The Borror Lab is well-known for both the quantity and quality of its animal sounds and is frequently asked to supply recordings from the collection for all kinds of purposes, from research to entertainment. Borror sounds can be heard in a variety of movies and commercials. Even Mickey Mouse relies on the Borror Lab: Walt Disney Studios has been a client.

Such proximity to glitz does not faze Gaunt, or Lab Director Doug Nelson, or the students and researchers who use the lab's facilities. The Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics is first and foremost a working research lab, with the emphasis on working. Taking care of the collection, and incidentally, continuously adding to it, is very hard and time-consuming work. Nelson, Gaunt, and their students travel the world to record—and home again; they have to painstakingly process what they have collected.

Sandra Gaunt has been the collections's curator since 1984 when an NSF facilities grant made it possible to fund a full-time curator, as well as buy new equipment for sound copying.

The Borror Lab's move a few years ago to the Museum of Biological Diversity with its work space that makes proper maintenance easier and enhances the ability to do world-class research and the more recent addition of Nelson to the zoology staff gave the Borror Lab another boost.

And now, thanks to an NSF grant in the neighborhood of $300,000 received last April, Nelson and Gaunt with their crew of students are able to begin to digitize the lab's collection, transferring the recordings from the more fragile analog tape to the practically indestructible CD-ROM format. The conversion of the tapes, not a small job, but no longer an impossible one, will take about two and a half to three years.

On Friday March 13, 1998, a celebratory crowd gathered at the Borror Lab's headquarters in the Museum of Biological Diversity to listen to bird-song and insect sounds, tour the lab, eat cake, commemorate a distinguished past, and kick-off a new era in animal sound technology. An extra bonus was being able to listen to Don Borror himself, on an early and only recording that captured his own "vocalizations."

The 50th birthday celebration came about almost incidentally: a graduate student working in the lab noticed the date of the tape he was converting just happened to be 1948. No one else had realized that 50 years had passed since Don Borror made those first early recordings in 1948 and ushered in a new discipline and a new era.

Time does fly when you're having fun!