THEY’RE shrill. They’re wild. They’re mobile ringtones — but not as we know them.

Forget Mission Impossible and The Great Escape, think Amazonian parrot and mallard duck. The British Library has licensed 40 recordings from its vast collection of animal noises and they are coming to a mobile phone near you.

The library has the world’s largest animal sound archive, which is regularly used for research purposes and some have been issued on CD. Now they are being made available to two companies that sell ringtones.

The first animal ringtones will be available on the Internet later this week for the latest “polyphonic” mobiles. The sounds are downloaded for between £1.50 and £4 each.

It is hoped the new “environmentally friendly” sounds will attract people who have shunned the mobile phone because of their offensive rings and that the warble of a songbird will be more soothing.

The innovative use of the archive could prove to be an important moneyspinner for the British Library. Downloading ringtones is already very big business, generating £2.5 billion a year.

However, some of the sounds could prove as irritating as the existing tones: besides the raucous screeches of the Amazonian parrot, the grunts of pigs and the thuds of a gorilla beating its chest will also be available.

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