Sound recording Rwanda's birds with Hilary MacBean

Hilary’s focus has been to raise the skills and confidence of wildlife guides from small communities in Rwanda to improve their job effectiveness. This and the need to build data for AI applications such as the Cornell Lab's Merlin led her into a multi-year effort in bird sound recording using the citizen science methods developed by eBird. The programme - Planet Birdsong - is novel in Africa and has proved very popular. One of Hilary's challenges has been to find and record the scarcer species in Rwanda. So in 2025, she led an exemplar expedition to Nyungwe Forest NP, a UNESCO Biosphere site in the southwest of Rwanda ‘In Pursuit of Shelley's Crimsonwing’. The success of the project is widely recognised and continues as we seek to embed Planet Birdsong as a locally led and managed entity, a model to make available to other African countries. Visit Planet Birdsong's website for more info: https://www.planetbirdsong.org/