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 methodical. He started recording sounds with a parabolic microphone and flashlight, capturing calls that had never been formally documented. Where taxonomy met tape recorder, a new discipline emerged. His contributions to conservation bioacoustics — before the term was widely used — were both scientific and sensory. In Nightlife of Australia’s South-eastern Forests and Frog Calls of Melbourne, he cataloged species through sound, pairing precision with accessibility. These albums became key reference tools for ecologists, landowners and amateur naturalists alike. Though best known for his work on owls, particularly the powerful (Ninox strenua) and sooty owl (Tyto spp.), McNabb’s influence spanned a wide range of forest birds and arboreal mammals. From 1996 to 2012, as a senior scientist…This article was originally published on Mongabay