Whether you find yourself looking for a pause in your day or the sounds of nature calm you, HPR's Manu Minute brings you melodies straight from Hawaiʻi's native forests and shorelines.
Host Patrick Hart also leads the LOHE Bioacoustics Lab — which stands for the Listening Observatory for Hawaiian Ecosystems — at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.
Hart drove from Hawaiʻi Island's east side to be with The Conversation in Waimea last Friday for a live interview at the Kahilu Theatre. He shared how the idea for the show came about.
"We study bird song in our lab, and I thought that the radio is just a great way to connect people with the song of birds, because you only hear them, and that's the way birds connect with each other too, is just by sound more than sight," Hart said.
"I just thought radio would be a good place to just introduce some of the songs, the amazing songs, of our native birds, and also just talk about their conservation as well in ecology."
Hart also uses artificial intelligence to help sort through his hundreds of hours of bird recordings, learning how many birds are left and how they are doing over time.
"It turns out now that we have new ways, you can put out these automated recorders that are waterproof. You can put them out in the forest for months at a time, pick them up, take the sound cards, upload hundreds of recorders' worth of data over months into the computer, and we've trained AI algorithms to be able to detect the song of every species," he told HPR.
"And you can count how many songs there is, and we have ways now estimating based on the number of songs that they make, how many birds we have left, and then how they're doing over time in each location."
Manu Minute airs Wednesdays on The Conversation.
This interview aired on The Conversation on March 28, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m.
