The Martians have landed, or at least that’s what it sounds like. The recording below, of Birds-of-paradise in New Guinea, is merely one of more than 150,000 new digital recordings released online for free by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Researchers have been collecting sounds of the natural world since 1929, and not just of birds, but animals of all sorts including whales, elephants, and primates.

You can listen to the collection at MacCaulayLibrary.org and share your favourite discoveries across Twitter or Facebook. Digitizing the tracks is something that has taken Cornell staff dozens of years to complete with the result being an astonishing 10 Terabytes of data that has a total audio runtime of 7,513 hours.

For years these recordings have been available to researchers, museums, moviemakers, and bird enthusiasts, but by giving the whole collection free access online, the hope is to encourage the general public to give a listen just for fun. There are more than 9,000 species represented with many surprises to uncover, such as the above clip of a Lemur called the Indri.

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