Listening to Itombwe: a conflict-affected forest, heard through microphones
On Thursday 22 October 2026, Cédric-Dubois Muliri, founder and director of Artemis Africa, will present the Itombwe Listening Project at "Listening to Africa", a free webinar run by Wildlife Acoustics.
Uwase Christa
10/12/20263 min read
A forest that surveys struggle to reach
The Itombwe Massif belongs to the Albertine Rift, a mountain region the webinar programme describes as a biodiversity hotspot. Forest loss over several decades and armed conflict have left field surveys patchy at best, and at times out of the question. Some of the birds that matter most here are nocturnal, secretive and poorly known. For them, a microphone is often a better witness than a person with a torch, and it keeps working while the team is somewhere else.
What the first campaign collected
In February and March 2026, the project placed Song Meter and AudioMoth recorders at 11 stations. Together they captured more than 2,000 hours of sound, mostly at night and around dawn, when many forest birds call and few can be seen. Trackers from villages near the massif learned the basics of bioacoustics with the team: setting a unit, logging each station, looking after the equipment.
133,386 detections, and why that is not 133,386 birds
Two programmes handled the first pass. Kaleidoscope Pro sorted the recordings; BirdNET Analyzer proposed a species for each short clip, and returned 133,386 raw detections. Treat that figure as a workload, not a result. One bird singing for an hour can produce hundreds of detections, and the software has fewer reference recordings for some Central African species than for many European ones, so some of its suggestions are wrong.
The most frequent high-confidence labels include birds typical of Albertine Rift montane forest, among them the Black-faced and Rwenzori apalises. That is what the habitat would lead one to expect, and the team still checks such labels by ear.
Why no rare species has been announced
Some recordings show patterns that do not fit the common species the software assigns to them. The field report weighs three explanations: a target species is present and mislabelled; a related but different species is calling; or the sound is background noise or an amphibian. The team keeps all three open and treats these recordings as candidate signals, nothing more.
Selected recordings are now under expert validation by specialists outside the field team. Until that review is complete and published, Artemis Africa will not name a rare species, and will not describe a candidate signal as a confirmed record. The restraint is deliberate. A claim about a rare bird can change conservation decisions, so it has to survive other people listening to the same sound.
The people who keep the recorders running
The recorders did not leave with the team. They are now looked after by Human and Birds, a local club in Fizi Territory, South Kivu, which you can read about in [lien vers l'article 3]. The aim is monitoring that continues between survey campaigns and does not depend on one project cycle. It remains an aim: the club's equipment, training and running costs still have to be secured.
What the webinar covers
The talk is titled "The Itombwe Listening Project: Using Song Meters in a Conflict-Affected Albertine Rift Hotspot". It is one of three in the programme, alongside an Africa-wide review of bioacoustics research and a talk on South African inland wetlands. The recorded presentation is followed by live questions. Wildlife Acoustics' webinar series draws mainly academics and practitioners, so expect technical questions.
When: Thursday 22 October 2026, 10:00 to 12:00 US Eastern time (16:00 to 18:00 in Kigali and Bukavu).
Where: online, hosted by Wildlife Acoustics.
What comes next
A British Ecological Society grant supports an extension toward the southern part of the massif, once conditions allow. The project is supported by ZGAP, the African Bird Club, Wildlife Acoustics (which also hosts this webinar and has supported the project with equipment), the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund and the British Ecological Society.
Join us. Register for the webinar and bring your questions. If your institution wants to support long-term acoustic monitoring in Itombwe, write to contact@artemisafrica.org.
