“The last Action Plan didn’t have nearly as much stuff on climate change about it, because we didn’t have the evidence,” he said. Garnett said that may be a focus of the next Action Plan, which is updated each decade. You’ve got climate change, plus the insecticides that are being pumped out everywhere.” “That’s where a big part of our problem lies. “All our insectivores are in decline,” he said. Stewart highlighted another issue: the catastrophic decline of insects, a view supported by the listing of the previously abundant bogong moth as endangered. Garnett’s Action Plan has documented the increasing impact of fire and global heating on Australian birds. The collage ends with the morse code-like song of the night parrot, the enigmatic species whose call was entirely unknown to science until 2013. They’re clicks, they’re rattles, they’re squawks and deep bass notes.” “Some of these sounds will shock listeners because they’re extremely percussive, they’re not melodious at all.

“I kept listening until I could feel a structure coming to me, like a quirky dawn chorus. “I listened to the birds one after the other and I found it incredibly moving,” Slattery said. The rest of the album’s tracks are of Stewart’s recordings in isolation. “I’m really keen to understand whether environmental art such as this project can have an impact on attitudes and behaviour.”Īlbrecht’s collaborator and Bowerbird Collective co-founder, violinist Simone Slattery, arranged a musical collage of the 53 species for the opening track of Songs of Disappearance.

“He asked whether the Bowerbird Collective could do anything to help promote, and it was immediately obvious to me what we needed to do,” Albrecht said. The project was the result of a conversation between the Bowerbird Collective’s Anthony Albrecht, a PhD student at Charles Darwin University, and his supervisor Stephen Garnett, the author of the recently updated Action Plan for Australian Birds, which found that one in six Australian birds are now threatened with extinction.

Darwin project duo