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 at the Victoria Department of Sustainability and Environment, he led surveys across more than 2,000 public land sites. He helped identify more than 550 zones of ecological significance, protecting some 300,000 hectares (about 741,000 acres) of habitat. Few individuals have had a more tangible impact on Victoria’s biodiversity planning.
McNabb also had an eye for the human side of conservation. In 1994, he founded Ninox Pursuits, a consultancy that doubled as a publishing outlet for his fieldwork. His outreach extended to community groups, Trust for Nature land stewards, and curious volunteers. His presentations, interspersed with jarring bursts of animal calls, were as unforgettable as the creatures he studied.
He was not, in the usual sense, a campaigner. He preferred data to rhetoric, presence to publicity. Yet his stewardship of his own forested property in the town of Gembrook, shared with his wife Susie, showed what personal responsibility could look like. It became a haven for species he once feared lost.
McNabb died of melanoma in May 2025. In his final years, he wrote Whoo Is Calling?, a wry and generous chronicle of a life spent chasing shadows in the canopy. He never sought fame. What he wanted was for people to pay attention — not just to the noise, but to the silence that followed when a species slipped away.
Banner image: Ed McNabb. Image courtesy of the Australia Wildlife Sound Recording Group (AWSRG).
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