Sounding Wild Exploration in Urdaibai
The Sounding Wild Exploration (SWE) team has had a great start to their expedition, with a stay at the Bird Center in Urdaibai, in the Basque Country.
The team of Axel and Ario Drioli liaised closely with Rowan Hardman of the Bird Centre. Together they figured out when and where to record sounds and take photographs of wildlife in the area. Rising early to catch the dawn chorus, they also recorded reed warblers. They even found a black woodpecker that no one had known about before.
The Bird Centre was able to help them out with local information, and contacts, and with access to the internet and nice showers! In return, the brothers gave the Bird Centre a novel visitor event.
They edited together a virtual reality (VR) presentation, where visitors sat between ten loudspeakers and put on a VR headset.
You can experience some of the effect by watching this video while wearing headphones, but it is better with a VR headset.
This second video shws the exhibition and interviews some of the visitors (they loved it).
The Bird Centre is a member of Migratory Birds for People (MBP), a network that WLI supports in the East Atlantic Flyway. MBP is connecting the expedition to wetland visitor centres in the flyway.
The Sounding Wild Exploration brothers have now moved on to the Aiguamolls wetland visitor centre in the south of Spain.
Find out more on the Bird Center website.