mangaluru ramit singal programme coordinator bird count india as well as founder manipal birders club now has recorded more than 2000 audio recordings in the macaulay library macaulay library is the worlds premier scientific archive of natural history audio and video recordings as well as photographs at cornell university new yorkramit currently in australia told toi it is a platform where anyone can upload their contributions directly or via the bird recording platform ebird i use ebird to make bird checklists and in the process record birds and upload them to the archive via ebird as wellexplaining his journey ramit who started recording bird calls in 2009 said i used my camera to record sounds and later my phone i did so to be able to remember bird calls and shared the calls for others to use as well i continued recording like this until 2017 when i attended a workshop on sound recording at cornell university and since then i have been trying hard to make better quality recordings he now uses more sophisticated equipment to record calls like a sound recorder a microphone and a parabolic dish to isolate calls making good recordings of bird calls requires knowing what you are recording patience quiet environments and preferably calm and clear weatherunderstanding bird sounds is also very important for understanding bird behaviour and their status in the environment they live ini have recorded almost 700 species of birds in various countries of which 409 were recorded in india he said he enjoyed recording birds in karnataka the most i have recorded 171 species of birds in karnataka in the macaulay library i have the highest number of recordings amongst those recording birds in india and i am also amongst the top 10 people worldwide to have added to the archives using ebird we dont know a lot about the calls of even the common birds so we need a number of people to go out and record often there are several recordists in india with a large number of recordings who may not have their recordings on macaulay library yet he said