This curatorial essay describes the overarching goals and primary scholarly interlocutors for the Lightning Birds project, lays out the rationale for its audiographic form, and provides a brief overview of each episode. Lightning Birds is a work or multimodal publishing with audio at its core, and you might think of this essay as the "liner notes" for the five episodes.

The first episode introduces the project, and then turns to the practice of bird banding, the oldest means of studying bird migration.

This episode concerns instances when towers -- in particular radio and television towers -- have come into contact with the flight ways of migratory birds.

Episode three concerns radar, a system of logistical radio that set the stage for radar ornithology, a field that has yielded important discoveries about bird migration.

Episode four examines the use of sound recording technologies to study the flight calls of migratory birds.

The final episode considers the influence of transistor technology, both in terms of portable radios and the radio telemetry devices that are used to study bird migration.

This document provides a bibliography of the scholarly texts related to or cited by the project, as well as information about the audio clips, interviews, and bird recordings heard in each episode.