Edward McNabb, pioneer of conservation bioacoustics died on May 7, aged 81

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For most people, the bush falls silent after dark. For Edward McNabb, it came alive. In the folds of night across the forests in the Australian state of Victoria, he attuned himself to sounds few others could name: the resonant trill of a sooty owl, the scratch of a glider, the croak of a burrowing frog. Over five decades, he made it his life’s work to listen, record and protect what others too often missed. McNabb began his career as a wildlife ecologist in the 1970s, sparked not in a university lecture hall but while jogging in the Dandenong Ranges. Sunrise and dusk brought him face-to-face with the hidden world of nocturnal fauna. That curiosity turned meth