sound library

condition (record/cover): NM / EX (small tag on front and back)

June Stannard was a South African amateur ornithologist who, in the early sixties, took a tape recorder into the bush and made the first long-playing records of African bird song, of which this is one. Amanzi (Zulu for "water") was the family farm in the Eastern Cape, and the record is structured as a day there, dawn to dusk on side one, then the calls identified one by one on side two, with a spoken introduction by Cecily Niven, the daughter of Sir Percy FitzPatrick and the founder of the ornithological institute that bears his name.

It is a tender, entirely unscientific-sounding piece of science, and the birds (hornbills, robins, a fish eagle) are ones no European record had documented. South African pressing only, scarce.