Many mammals vocalise and knowing their calls can be useful for locating them and for identifying similar looking species; for example some of the chipmunks and galagos. Some species – especially primates – also respond well to call playback.
The list below, of mammal audio files organised by ecozone, is a work in progress. Please let me know if you know of other call libraries I can link to, or have sound files of your own that we can share here.
Global
Xeno-Canto.org is now including mammals. This should become the premier place to share and find mammal sounds. See this post from January 2025.
The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a huge collection of audio and visual files. As of late 2017 some 570 mammals are included.
The Animal Sound Archive at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin consists of about 120,000 bioacoustical recordings. As of late some 580 mammals are included.
The British Library of Wildlife Sounds holds more than 240,000 scientifically organised and documented field recordings covering all classes of sound-producing animals from every zoogeographical region. More than 10,000 species of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects are represented, including many rare and threatened species. Most British and European species are covered.
The Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics in Ohio covers a range of mammals.
Fonozoo (Fonoteca Zoológica) in Madrid is another large global database. In late 2017 over 1400 entries were for mammals.
iNaturalist has a range of sounds too (and you can also upload your own): here are the mammal species so far.
Africa
The East Africa Primate Diversity Program has a call library covering many species of Galago and another covering most of the Hyraxes. These calls can be instrumental in helping to identify similar looking species. In any case, hyrax calls are just plain entertaining.There are other calls here too, including African Palm Civet, and the library is growing.
Daan Drukker’s set of 20 calls from 8 species of West African squirrel is very useful. You can download them to your phone.
Asia
Daan Drukker’s set of calls from some common Mongolian rodents are downloadable to your phone.
Australia
CSIRO (the scientifc arm of the Australian Government) maintains a wildlife sound archive. Primarily birds, it also includes mammals from Australia, New Guinea and beyond. In late 2017 the archive was being turned into a digital database and was gradually being made available online through the Atlas of Living Australia.
Wild Ambience in Australia have a few mammal calls including the spectacularly weird call of a Yellow-bellied Glider.
Europe
The British Library of Wildlife Sounds has a worldwide collection including a number of UK mammals. If you want to know what a European Mole sounds like now’s your chance!
A 2 CD set in French “Guide sonore des mammiferes d´Europe” by Jean C. Roche and Boris Jollivet covers 46 species. The second CD is less useful for mammal watchers as it covers soundscapes.
Several CDs on a German website feature mammals, and though the site is in German it seems some of these are in several language similtaneously (and all include latin names).
This double CD has an impressively broad range of mammal sounds.
A deer call CD covers 24 species;
All the bears are covered in this one;
This CD covers many of the larger canids.
South America
Although I think it is out of press, you might be able to pick up a CD of “Sounds of Neotropical Rainforest Mammals: An Audio Field Guide” compiled by Louise Emmons. It includes 105 South American species and subspecies. I’ve used this in the Amazon and it was pretty useful especially for learning the primate calls.