Entangled Records: Voicing Bird Citizen Science in Costa Rica

During my ethnographic fieldwork in the rural canton of Sarapiquí in northeastern Costa Rica, I participated in three day-long community-led bird counts: the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s October Big Day in 2021 and Global Big Day in May 2022, and the thirty-seventh annual La Selva Christmas Bird Count in late December 2021. Costa Rican naturalist volunteers carry out the primary data collection on these local-regional censuses for bird citizen science, which is ordinarily defined as scientific research involving the public participation of people who generally are not professional scientists.^[1] Citizen-science bird counts are crucial initiatives that inform conservation research addressing the long-term effects of climate change and land use on bird populations and communities at a wide range of geographic scales.^[2] The objective of any bird census or count, broadly defined, is to document all bird individuals and species encountered visually and/or aurally over a certain time frame in a certain area. Thus, participants on bird counts act as sensory witnesses to bird species’ presences. Data collection depends on naturalists’ multisensory methods of engaging with birds, and often especially with their sounds. However, the local acoustic ways of knowing^[3] and sounded methods of citizen-science participants, especially those from communities in the Global South, have yet to be the subject of intensive ethnographic inquiry.

In this article,^[4] I consider how local naturalists utilize vocal imitation (imitar) in the making of species records as they collaboratively navigate their specific routes on bird censuses. In Sarapiquí, I regularly observed local naturalists, both professional guides who work in ecotourism and lay participants, vocally imitating birds’ sounds as part of their methods on bird counts, in coordination with their visual and aural techniques of observation and occasional use of audio playback of bird-vocalization recordings. Between September 2021 and July 2022, I carried out fieldwork in Sarapiquí with the community of four generations of local naturalist guides based at La Selva Research Station, which has been owned and operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) since 1968. There, I explored how local naturalists practice imitar as an embodied way of knowing birds’ singing/vocalizations (cantos). Imitar enables guides to communicate with and attract birds, and to teach ecotourists how to aurally recognize, identify, and locate birds at a species-specific level. Through a sensory-ethnographic approach,^[5] I acted as a “sensory apprentice”^[6] to guides, walking with them and shadowing their vocal-imitative practices.

Local naturalists imitate cantos for similar purposes on ecotours and bird counts. In both contexts, imitations are often directed at a bird’s listening attention, to evoke a vocal response or encourage the bird to come closer (audio 1). A bird’s response to an imitation could indicate the presence of a new species for that particular count or tour or alternatively could help confirm an identification by providing another opportunity to hear an individual sing. In other cases, naturalists direct imitations of cantos primarily to other naturalists or tourists, to aid in indicating a particular canto to other people or to help confirm an aural identification for a species.

Audio 1: While leading a birding tour in La Selva Research Station, first-generation local naturalist guide Joel Alvarado imitates cantos of black-throated wren to elicit a response from that bird species (17 January 2022). Recording credit: the author.

The first generation of local naturalist guides who were trained and hired to work at La Selva in 1989/1990 brought the local, rural tradition of imitar into the world of the research station. In the community of Sarapiquí naturalists, imitar has never been a codified practice or something formally taught through direct instruction or explanation. Techniques and practical contexts of imitar are shared informally among local naturalists through arrangements of collaboration, mentoring, and apprenticeship in the field. Naturalists learn to imitate through their practical experience of fine-tuning their skills, expertise, and knowledge of the local avifauna.

The professional and informal mentoring of younger generations of naturalists, which is ongoing, nourishes imitar as an embodied, local ornithological method for knowing and monitoring the region’s avifauna. Guides’ collaborative labor on bird counts produces scientific knowledge on the regional bird community. Their place-based practices of imitar perform biodiversity and position them as stewards of birds. Accordingly, through an ethno-ornithological lens,^[7] I introduce these citizen-science projects to outline potential for future research on the intersection of multiple methodologies and epistemologies in biodiversity studies. How might alternative models of avian biodiversity account for the entanglement of culture and nature, the collaborative performance of interspecies knowledge, and community-level place-making? My sensory-ethnographic focus bridges historical and sociocultural studies of listening and sounding techniques in ornithological and other biological fieldwork^[8] with alternative sensory-vocal field methods of local naturalists to emphasize intercultural knowledge formations. In addition, this case study brings special attention to postcolonial arrangements in ecological research and centers knowledge and power relations between the Global North and South.

“Mixed with rain and a little distance”: Collaborative Envoiced Recording of a Canto

On 14 May 2022, I participated with a group of ten local naturalists from Sarapiquí on the Global Big Day (GBD), an annual citizen-science initiative launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2015. Our group was one of a dozen or so that together made up the team for the Sarapiquí region. The GBD falls on the second week of May, at the peak of the spring bird migration, when the highest number of potential species is expected. Tens of thousands of observers assemble into local-regional teams from over 200 countries. Each group within a regional team is responsible for covering a specific area or route, with the primary objective of observing and identifying as many bird individuals and species as possible within the twenty-four-hour period. Each group records and submits their total observations for the day through the eBird app, which is the mobile, public infrastructure of the Lab of Ornithology’s archival and citizen-science data analyses. The data, which are publicly available through eBird, allow the Cornell Lab and other research groups to analyze and monitor bird populations and communities over time.^[9]

In the case of the Sarapiquí team, each year, team members collate the groups’ eBird lists for their respective routes to produce a master list of species records for the region, which can then be compared with lists from other regions in the country. The total list of species recorded in Costa Rica for the day can then be compared with other countries’ lists. The collating and comparing of lists continue up to the level of the “globe.” The database thus documents bird species richness and diversity across manifold scales from the local to the global.

Our site for the May 14^th GBD was a sector of Lapa Verde Refuge, located near the small rural town of Pueblo Nuevo in Sarapiquí, about fourteen kilometers west of La Selva. Lapa Verde is an 1,825-hectare private reserve owned by Ecovida, a Swiss foundation (fig. 1). The foundation’s mission is to conserve and restore forest habitats. Most of the site is covered by middle-aged regenerating forest, but it also has a variety of other habitats including abandoned pastures and pineapple plantation, streams, ponds, and reforested areas (fig. 2). For the first couple hours of the morning, until about 7:30 a.m., our whole group stayed together to observe birds along the entrance road to the reserve. After that, we split into two subgroups and began our independent routes in opposite directions along a roughly twelve-kilometer loop. The trail for most of the route was an old logging road, now bordered mostly by second-growth forest on both sides.

The makeup of our five-person subgroup exemplifies the model of collaboration employed by the community of Sarapiquí naturalists in bird counts. First, each group responsible for a particular route or site has a leader, who, in the case of our group, was Geiner Huertas, a third-generation local naturalist who had coordinated the GBD Pueblo Nuevo team for the past few years uert. With few exceptions, each leader is a first-, second- or third-generation local naturalist with experience in guiding or in mentoring people who are younger and/or have less practical knowledge of birds. Second, each group has several naturalists with intermediate to advanced level of experience and knowledge. In our group, these intermediate-level participants included Geiner’s brother, Gabriel Huertas, and Jeffry Castro, a fourth-generation local naturalist who regularly birds with Geiner and Gabriel. These intermediate naturalists are often from younger generations, as in Jeffry’s case, or are not as active professionally in guiding, as in Gabriel’s case. Finally, each group has one or two beginner naturalists/birders, like Jorge Conejo in our group, who observe and learn from the more experienced members of the group. Jorge is a naturalist about Geiner’s age who grew up in the Sarapiquí countryside, but now lives in Guapiles, and had become interested in birdwatching just three months before the count.

Around 9 a.m. on our route, in the rain, a pigeon sang off in the distance. We heard just two notes of its canto. Geiner asked the rest of the group, “Do you not hear the pigeon?”^[10] The pigeon sang again—two clearer notes, and then a softer note or two trailing off. Gabriel then affirmed that he had heard it too: “Ah yes, it’s a pigeon.”^[11] I really struggled to hear the pigeon at all in the field, though I was able to detect the canto after the fact while reviewing my audio recordings for the day.

Geiner promptly imitated the canto using a high and very muted falsetto technique, envoicing^[12] the throaty quality of the still unidentified pigeon’s singing. Here, Geiner’s imitating did two things. First, he recorded (grabar) the canto in his mind and in his vocal capacities through his envoiced understanding of the pigeon’s way of singing. By imitating the ambiguously identified canto as he heard it in the moment of the pigeon’s singing, he also recorded his embodied proximity to the bird in his canto-memory. Second, he shared his envoiced interpretation of the canto at this proximity with the other naturalists in our group. These aspects of his imitating formed part of an identifying process that was both personal and collaborative. By sharing aspects of his listening experience through his imitation, Geiner shared his uncertainty about the bird’s ID and opened up an exchange with other sensory witnesses.

Gabriel: Scaled pigeon?

Jeffry: It seemed like it, but…

Geiner: It’s that I am not hearing the notes it is making.

Author: I think red-billed [pigeon].

Geiner: I think we are hearing something like that. Well, if you listen [with] more reach, we don’t hear [that].^[13]

Geiner suggested that I might be hearing the canto more clearly or differently through my mics. I turned the gain up very high and listened again.

Geiner: You don’t hear it?

Author: I don’t hear it. […] No, it’s strange. I don’t hear [it] with the microphones. Just the rain.

Geiner: Yes. No, not anymore. It’s harder for me. Right, like—^[14]

Geiner promptly imitated the canto again—now three high falsetto notes, more closely matching the second instance of the canto that we had heard.

Gabriel: Just like—Coo cooo coooo^[15]

Now, Gabriel imitated the canto for the first time. His grainy falsetto, which was lower than Geiner’s, broke on the second note as it rose in frequency. He seemed to capture the hoarse (ronco) vocal quality that is characteristic of scaled pigeon, the ID he had verbally suggested earlier. Gabriel thus envoiced a different species identity than Geiner.

Geiner: I wasn’t able to distinguish the notes […]

Gabriel: It sounded like scaled pigeon to me.

Jeffry: That mixed with rain and a little distance.^[16]

Gabriel played a recording of scaled pigeon on his phone to compare with the canto we had heard and which he and Geiner had imitated. Then Gabriel played a recording of a third species, blue ground-dove, upon Jeffry’s request, but Jeffry quickly agreed that it was not that species. In the end, we did not arrive at a definitive ID for the pigeon. We did not mark down this individual bird on our group’s eBird list for the count; in the knowledge-making domain of eBird, our sensory encounter with the pigeon did not count as a species record.

Nonetheless, in a material, embodied way, the above collaborative moment of sensing, envoicing, and identifying enacted a different kind of record for the ambiguously identified pigeon. The record of the pigeon materialized across Geiner and Gabriel’s differing imitative interpretations and identifications of its canto. Moreover, their imitating envoiced the bird’s singing “mixed with rain and with a little distance,” the multisensorial “atmosphere”^[17] of their correspondence and embodied proximity with the pigeon. The emplaced record of sensing and identifying took hold, on the one hand, between naturalists and the pigeon, and, on the other, between naturalists. The in-betweenness of the record lies in the material, vibrational relations of attunement^[18] and interpersonal interpretation that locate people and bird together en route. Along the route of the day, one after another of these identifying correspondences, most of which led to definitive IDs, unfolded as naturalists made emplaced records of and with birds in Pueblo Nuevo.

Situating Sensory Ways of Knowing in Citizen Science

My participation on bird counts prompted me to critically consider how Sarapiquí naturalists’ ethno-ornithological practices of imitar form biodiversity data for Western science. This orientation asks, what are citizen-science “data,” how are those data produced, and where are “records” of species located? This inquiry extends a core impulse in science and technology studies, which is to elucidate how scientific knowledge is produced and to expose the sociocultural contexts that condition scientific research.^[19] By articulating naturalists’ vocal ways of knowing birds and making species records, I emphasize the “situated knowledges”^[20] and “epistemic practices” that ground public participation in scientific research.^[21]

My engagement with naturalists’ embodied methods for doing bird counts casts into relief the multiple knowledge-producing practices and forms of expertise involved in citizen-science projects. This perspective aids in exposing the varied epistemic forms of participation in so-called “citizen-science” research, while enriching a critique of traditional contrastive categories of “lay” or “amateur” and “professional” scientist.^[22] This contrast obscures diverse forms of expertise and professionalism, for example in the work of La Selva’s naturalist and birding guides, while tending to reinforce unequal power relations in research encounters.

Local naturalists are scientists and what they do is a kind of science—specifically, an ornithology that entwines local embodied ways of knowing with Western technologies and techniques. They continually make records in their everyday life: scientific records that are irreducible to eBird lists. Thus, future research in Costa Rica and elsewhere should address how ecological knowledge production is sustained by local naturalists’ interspecies ways of knowing and working. This approach would support a rebalancing of epistemologies that accounts for embodied, sounded, and place-based perspectives.

In Western scientific research, records of individuals and species on a bird count are constructed as quantitative data. Once a species record is produced as a data point, the event of observation and human-bird engagement is severed and separated out. As data points, bird individual or species records factor out the embodied, sensory methods and conditions for record-making. The data that are recorded in eBird appear as a list of species names with a specific number of individuals attached to each name. Species records do not concern how humans experience birds and thus do not distinguish bird observations according to sensory modalities, that is, whether a certain species was seen, heard, or seen and heard. It is possible to include an annotation with this information, and it is customary to attach audio recordings or photographs for rarer species, but these annotations and documentation are typically peripheral to the species record as data point. From that perspective of Western scientific methodology, which reifies biological diversity as a natural domain separate from knowledge practices, vocal-imitative practices, as methods of record-making, are even more peripheral.

Sarapiquí naturalists’ interspecies practices perform a different kind of record, one that grounds knowledge of biological diversity in human-bird relations. Records of bird species are vocally embodied and remain not just in the ongoing lifeways of the birds—the subjects/objects of those records—but always also in naturalists’ relational memories and ongoing entanglement with those birds. Imitar repeatedly enacts an ambiguity of subject-object distinctions^[23] in emplaced records, as naturalists’ vocal methods leave marks of those records on their own bodies. In this envoiced practice of record-making, the objectivity of particular species records is locally performed through naturalists’ entanglements of vocality and location^[24] with birds.

In the above example, the exclusion of the pigeon from our list for Pueblo Nuevo points up a threshold between human-bird encounter and species record. A record of a particular bird is, first, an in-the-moment event that unfolds between naturalist(s) and bird. Thus, the factoring-out of sensing in the production of data points also factors out the temporality of human-bird engagement. As the above example makes clear, from the perspective of local naturalists’ embodied methods, ability, and experience, imitar is a vital element of record-making. Imitar partially configures the material, sounded relations and ways of knowing that ground the possibility of bird citizen-science data in Sarapiquí. In the temporality of interspecies engagement, imitar is fluidly integrated with listening and looking in naturalists’ process of interpreting, locating, and identifying cantos, and in practices of llamar (calling) to attract birds to facilitate visual observation and/or confirm species identity. Whether in the context of a local institutional census, as in the La Selva Christmas Bird Count,^[25] or in the context of a “global” Cornell program, Sarapiquí naturalists, at a local-regional community level, perform the interspecies labor that conditions the production of Western scientific data on bird biodiversity. Moreover, the sensing role of local naturalists enacts a different relationality from that in bioacoustics monitoring research, which relies on audio recording and machine listening technologies to identify and locate species and establish records.^[26]

This research perspective on citizen science opens a new path for sensory ethnography to articulate the material relations in local ways of knowing. How do local ways of sensing hold multispecies places and knowledge communities together? The participatory nature of sensory apprenticeship can support community-driven action by shifting emphasis to local practitioners’ embodied modes of belonging, producing knowledge, and doing science. This centering of collectivity in local participation in science aids in reframing the top-down designation of “citizen” and what Fa-ti Fan and Shun-Ling Chen delineate as the “cosmopolitan community of knowledge” invoked by that figure of citizenry.^[27] As is likely also the case in myriad other communities of local naturalists across the Global South, Sarapiquí naturalists’ identification with the broader “imagined community”^[28] of ecological/scientific knowledge production is multivalent and never predefined. Highlighting sensory processes of knowing the environment may bring into focus alternative modes of scientific collaboration that defer to local community values around conservation and ethical cohabitation with other species and the relations that ground those values.

Other ethnographies have begun this work by describing practitioners’ sensory methods in case studies of citizen science focused on bird communities^[29] and a gray wolf population in the United States.^[30] In addition, the latter study identified multiple auditory and acoustic methods that distinguished wolf monitoring methodologies of the lead biologists/primary investigators and citizen-science participants, respectively. While the former employed radio telemetry, playback, and vocal imitation, the latter, referred to as “hearing aids,” limited their acoustic methods to listening.^[31] These studies illuminate the potential for a rigorous focus on sensory ways of knowing in citizen science in a range of cultural contexts, to understand how the knowledges of these multiple actors are enmeshed.

The La Selva Christmas Bird Count and Community Empowerment

The division of labor between “professional” scientists and “public” participants^[32] in bird citizen-science projects often conceals the sensory, collective action involved in participants’ field methods. Consider Boyle and Sigel’s 2015 study of changes in the bird community of La Selva Research Station, which was based on data from twenty-three years of La Selva Christmas Bird Counts. The authors’ publication provides new insights into how populations of tropical forest generalist and specialist bird species change over time in relation to patterns of forest regeneration, while suggesting how trends in some species’ decline may be linked with climate change.^[33] Here, the labor and contribution of local naturalists’ record-making was limited to two sentences in the acknowledgements: “We are indebted to the hundreds of dedicated volunteer bird-counters who collected these data, and to the staff of La Selva Biological Station for curating and making the data freely available to us. We especially wish to thank Joel Alvarado, Enrique Castro, Orlando Vargas, and Jim Zook.”^[34]

While this kind of acknowledgement is better than no acknowledgement, the statement does not reveal how local naturalists co-produced these data with other Costa Rican participants through their intergenerational, collaborative methods or how those local knowledge practices support community-level cooperation and empowerment. Local naturalists’ interspecies listening and vocal practices perform ecological knowledge in the resonances between human and bird subjects. While my Costa Rican interlocutors do not self-identify as Indigenous, the friction between these embodied resonances and the extractive history of foreign-led ecological research in Latin America echoes Dylan Robinson’s decolonial project centered on listening. Robinson writes, “To challenge settler colonial perception requires reorienting the form by which we share knowledge, the way we convey the experience of sound, song, and music.”^[35] Foregrounding practitioners’ sensory, interspecies knowledge provides an embodied, experiential basis for negotiating and reworking unequal power relations in ecotourism, scientific field research, and other postcolonial encounters. The La Selva CBC is one of the longest-running Christmas Bird Counts in the neotropics.

The fortieth annual count was completed in December 2024. I participated in the 2021 La Selva CBC with group leader Kenneth Alfaro, a second-generation local guide who has worked in La Selva since 2004; and sisters Morelia Miranda and Veronica Miranda, who are fourth-generation local naturalists (figs. 4–5). The count now involves over a hundred participants, who, in groups of roughly five people, cover different routes over twenty-six different trails—fifteen inside La Selva and eleven in surrounding areas. The routes cover a total of roughly 200 square kilometers, which is a radius of about twelve miles. Since 2000, Orlando Vargas has co-coordinated the count with two other first-generation local naturalists—Joel Alvarado and Paco Madrigal—in addition to Enrique Castro, Administrator of Scientific Services in La Selva, and Bruce Young, an American conservation biologist who began research in La Selva in the 1980s.

The La Selva CBC was initiated in 1985 by the station directors at the time, forest ecologists David and Deborah Clark; in coordination with the eminent American ornithologist and co-author of A Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica (1989), F. Gary Stiles; and a U.S. guiding agency, Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. The coordinators of the 1985 count established the event, in part, as an effort to raise funds for the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) to purchase land between La Selva and Braulio Carrillo National Park to serve as a corridor. OTS invited wealthy birders from around the world to come to La Selva to participate and make donations.^[36] With the accomplishment of the 1985 CBC, OTS became part of the National Audubon Society’s 100-year Christmas Bird Count program, a citizen-science database that has grown to include over 2500 counts across the Western Hemisphere each year.

Beginning in 1989, however, the structure of participation in the La Selva count began to change significantly. That year, La Selva’s station directors and two additional scientists partnered with OTS and the World Wildlife Fund to organize a course for local naturalists in La Selva. This course was the first of its kind in Costa Rica and Latin America,^[37] and the twenty-six members of this course became the first generation of local naturalists in Sarapiquí. Leadership in the CBC subsequently shifted to local naturalists, whose representation modeled community-based citizen science rather than emphasizing foreign involvement.

The structure of leadership, mentoring, and collaboration within groups on the count paralleled the arrangements of knowledge transmission and practical education developing between generations of local naturalist guides. Older, more experienced guides mentored the next generation (fig. 5). OTS started its own CBC database for La Selva in 1985, but after 1989, the developing generations of local naturalists led the yearly census, and their practical knowledge and labor produced the species records that allowed and continue to allow the count to be successful. Local naturalists’ ongoing data-collection, which now spans four decades, has proven indispensable to the long-term monitoring of La Selva’s bird community and to understanding patterns of change in bird populations. The collective coordination and labor of Costa Rican participants continually reaffirm and reinforce their sensory methods as an alternative embodied approach alongside bioacoustic monitoring regimes.^[38]

Conclusion

Local naturalists’ vocal-imitative methods are integral to their ongoing intergenerational collaborations in citizen science and biodiversity monitoring. Imitar weaves species records across place, memory, and bodies. This web of interspecies sensing, envoicing, and attention is the possibility for emplaced response and responsibility—the conditions for the present and future of knowing, being, and sounding with birds in Sarapiquí. Naturalists’ community-led monitoring, grounded in these place-based sensibilities, informs conservation efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change and habitat transformation.

I emphasize the examples of the Sarapiquí GBD and La Selva CBC to encourage equitable research perspectives on environmental problems that account for the sensory entanglement of environment, multiple methodologies, and multiple knowledges. These approaches could better acknowledge the heterogeneous ways of knowing and being that differently position humans within multispecies places. To that end, my hope is that this study will shed new light on the community of Sarapiquí naturalists and the interspecies vocal methods that shape their invaluable contribution to avian conservation science and knowledge of biodiversity.

1. Hauke Riesch and Clive Potter, “Citizen Science as Seen by Scientists: Methodological, Epistemological and Ethical Dimensions,” Public Understanding of Science 23, no. 1 (2014): 107, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662513497324; Bruno J. Strasser, Jérôme Baudry, Dana Mahr, Gabriela Sanchez, and Elise Tancoigne, “‘Citizen Science’? Rethinking Science and Public Participation,” Science & Technology Studies 32, no. 2 (2019): 52–76, https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.60425.

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2. W. Alice Boyle and Bryan J. Sigel, “Ongoing Changes in the Avifauna of La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica: Twenty-Three Years of Christmas Bird Counts,” Biological Conservation 188 (2015): 11–21; Jeremy J. D. Greenwood, “Citizens, Science and Bird Conservation,” Journal of Ornithology 148 (2007): 77–124, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-007-0239-9; Jacob Walker and Philip D. Taylor, “Using eBird Data to Model Population Change of Migratory Bird Species,” Avian Conservation and Ecology 12, no. 1: n.p., https://doi.org/10.5751/ACE-00960-120104.

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3. Steven Feld, “Acoustemology,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Duke University Press, 2015).

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4. This article is based on Chapter 6 of the author’s dissertation: Charles Colwell, “Hacer el Canto: Tracing Entanglements of Vocality and Interspecies Knowledge in the Imitative Practices of Costa Rican Naturalist Guides” (PhD diss., The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2025), 273–291, ProQuest (32242188). ↑

5. Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, Second edition (Sage, 2015).

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6. Greg Downey, Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art (Oxford University Press, 2005), 53. ↑

7. Michael Dove, “Uncertainty, Humility, and Adaptation in the Tropical Forest: The Agricultural Augury of the Kantu,” Ethnology 32, no. 2 (1993): 145–167; Yessica Angélica Romero-Bautista, Ana Isabel Moreno-Calles, Fernando Alvarado-Ramos, Maurino Reyes Castillo, and Alejandro Casas, “Environmental Interactions Between People and Birds in Semiarid Lands of the Zapotitlán Valley, Central Mexico,” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 16, no. 32 (2020): n.p., https://doi.org/10.1186/s13002-020-00385-1; Claire N. Spottiswoode and Brian M. Wood, “Culturally Determined Interspecies Communication Between Humans and Honeyguides,” Science 382 (2023): 1155–1158; Sonia Tidemann and Andrew Gosler, eds, Ethno-ornithology: Birds, Indigenous Peoples, Culture, and Society (Earthscan, 2010). ↑

8. Karen Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Joeri Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong (The MIT Press, 2018); Gavin Steingo, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (The University of Chicago Press, 2024); Mickey Vallee, Sound Bodies Sounding Worlds: An Exploration of Embodiments in Sound (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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9. Walker and Taylor, “Using eBird Data to Model Population Change of Migratory Bird Species,” n.p., https://doi.org/10.5751/ACE-00960-120104.

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10. Geiner Huertas, Juan Huertas, Jeffry Castro, and Jorge Conejo, participant observation, 14 May 2022. All quotations from interlocutors are translations from the original Spanish, except English bird-species common names. All Spanish-to-English translations in this article are my own.

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11. Ibid.

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12. Robert O. Beahrs, “Gifts of the Sygytchy-Sons: Tethering Melodies to Land, Kin, and Life Energy at the Khöömei Ovaa, Tyva Republic,” Asian Music 52, no. 2 (2021): 72–107. ↑

13. Ibid.

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14. Ibid.

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15. Ibid.

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16. Ibid.

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17. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge, 2011), 134.

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18. Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke University Press, 2015). ↑

19. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007); Donna Jeane Haraway, ModestWitness@SecondMillenium.FemaleManMeetsOncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, 1997); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Harvard University Press, 1987). ↑

20. Donna Jeane Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599. ↑

21. Strasser et al., “‘Citizen Science’? Rethinking Science and Public Participation,” 55.

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22. Ibid.

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23. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.

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24. Ibid.; Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description.

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25. Boyle and Sigel, “Ongoing Changes in the Avifauna of La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica,” 11–21.

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26. Mickey Vallee, “The Science of Listening in Bioacoustics Research: Sensing the Animals’ Sounds,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 2 (2018): 47–65.

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27. Fa-ti Fan and Shun-Ling Chen, “Citizen, Science, and Citizen Science,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 13, no. 2 (2019): 183.

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28. Ibid.

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29. Elizabeth Cherry, For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze (Rutgers University Press, 2019).

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30. Erik DeLuca, “Wolf Listeners,” Leonardo Music Journal 26 (2016): 87–91.

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31. DeLuca, “Wolf Listeners,” 88.

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32. Fan and Chen, “Citizen, Science, and Citizen Science,” 184.

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33. Boyle and Sigel, “Ongoing Changes in the Avifauna of La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica,” 11–21.

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34. Ibid., 20.

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35. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 15.

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36. Orlando Vargas, interview, 29 June 2022.

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37. Pia Paaby, David B. Clark, and Hector Gonzalez, “Training Rural Residents as Naturalist Guides: Evaluation of a Pilot Study in Costa Rica,” Conservation Biology 5 (1991): 542–546.

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38. Vallee, “The Science of Listening in Bioacoustics Research,” 47–65.

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    *Charles Colwell (he/him) holds a Ph.D. in Composition from the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation, “Hacer el Canto: Tracing Entanglements of Vocality and Interspecies Knowledge in the Imitative Practices of Costa Rican Naturalist Guides,” explores how local naturalist guides employ vocal imitation as an embodied way of knowing birds and their vocalizations/singing,and as a technique for educating ecotourists at La Selva Research Station in northeastern CostaRica.His work in ethno-ornithology and multispecies ethnography synthesizes anthropological methods and theory that harmonize with the values and embodied experiences of his interlocutors.