Field Note № 002 — Audio OSINT
Rapid Fire
A short burst and the bird behind it.
Bellingcat's audio clip is short. The context around it talked about tension and unrest in South Sudan and how sound carries across the landscape. The whole framing pushed you to hear a gunshot. However, sentence at the end pushed back: not everything is what it seems.
This writeup contains the solution. If you want to try the challenge yourself first, it is available at challenge.bellingcat.com.
Listening carefully
At first, it sounded exactly like combat footage. But on the second listen, I caught an animal sound, which made me think the clip was recorded in a woodland. So, I thought the main sound might not be a weapon after all.
Guessing the animal
My first guess was a woodpecker. The rhythm made sense. So, I looked into the native woodpecker species of South Sudan. However, none of them was large enough to produce a sound with that much weight. It had the right pattern, but the wrong scale. So, that theory went out the window.
What I needed was something loud. Loud enough to be mistaken for automatic fire.
Google Dorking
I ran one Google search:
"South Sudan" animal sounds like gunshot
The first page named a bird I had never heard of. The Shoebill. A tall, grey bird found in the swamps of central and east Africa.
When a Shoebill claps its beak together, a behaviour called bill-clattering, sounds exactly like a short machine-gun burst. I played some reference recordings alongside the Bellingcat clip and everything matched perfectly.
Evidence — YouTube Reference recording of Shoebill bill-clatteringThis one unravelled fast. Once you ignore the text, the tape stops sounding like combat and starts sounding like what it is.
To the Bellingcat team for this one. A short puzzle with a surprising answer. Looking forward to the next.