Tuesday, September 1, 1959. The sky is practically completely overcast. I can see at

least one star off to the west. Much of the sky is overcast. This is Tuesday,

September 1, 1959. The time is 8.15 pm, 8.15 pm central standard time. This

recording that you were listening to is 66 years old, and it was the first of its

kind, ever. After that initial bit of introduction, you are now listening to the

sound of birds migrating through the inky darkness of night. If you tried the

same thing today, you might use a small handheld microphone, but back then it was a

really really big one sitting in a six-foot-wide dish surrounded by

bales of hay. Basically, it was a lot of work to get this sound, and the guy you

hear on the tape, which was real to real tape, by the way, is Richard Graber. In 1957,

he and Bill Cochrane became the first people to record these nocturnal flight

calls. And when they did, they peered more deeply into the mysteries of bird

migration than arguably anyone ever had.

I'm Jacob Job, and you're listening to Scientific American Science Quickly. Birds

have fascinated people for centuries, but until relatively recently, we've

mostly taken an interest in their lives during the day. What happened after dark

was a mystery. That is beginning to change. Today, we're ears to the sky as we dive

into the science of nocturnal flight calls of migrating birds. We sit down with

the legend of the nocturnal flight call world to explore the history and

technology of the science and obsession of tracking migratory birds at night.

I'm sort of a bird watcher that got out of control. This is Bill Evans. He is a legend

in the nocturnal flight call community. Think Mickey Mantle in baseball level legend.

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