The Careful Art of ListeningBy Terry Krautwurst
It’s true that we humans tend not to see the forest for the trees. To an even greater extent when we’re outdoors, though, we fail to hear the forest for the seeing. We let our eyes be our guides when sounds, not sights, often provide more information about the life around us, most of it hidden or too distant to see.
The rush of shifting wind through treetops. The gurgle of stream water tumbling over stone. The hmmmm and bzzzzz of insects. The piercing call of a faraway bird. These are only a few of the sounds of the living forest. Some are constant; others fleeting. But all are components in a symphony that is not merely unfinished but perpetual, playing night and day. It is a work ever-in-progress worth listening to, carefully. Nature’s sounds not only soothe our civilized souls, but also tell tales of their makers’ lives.
Hush Up and Listen
You’re not likely to hear — or for that matter, see — wildlife unless you force yourself to take time out from whatever you’re doing outdoors and just sit still, for cryin’ out loud. All too often when I am outdoors the most dominant sound in my ears is the clump-clump-clumping or crunch-crunch-crunching of my own rambling feet. The sad truth is, we humans are a noisy, restless lot. What do most of us do in the great outdoors? We hike, we bike, we fish, we camp, we canoe, we rock climb, we move — almost constantly, and seldom silently. Most of us also carry another kind of noise into the woods with us from civilization: that infernal inner voice nagging us with everyday worries and jangled nerves.
All of that has to go. Remaining still and quiet and actually paying attention to audible nature is an ear-opening experience. But it’s not one that comes to us easily. And here’s the hardest part: You can’t just stop, listen for a few moments and then move on. You have to give the process time — time for you and your gotta-move human nature to settle down and truly tune in to sound, and time for the creatures around you to recover from the alarming cacophonous crashing of your arrival.
Try this the next time you’re outdoors: Look around for a tree with a base sufficiently wide to serve as a back rest and enough level ground beneath to serve as a seat. Make a comfortable cushion of leaves, pine needles or an old shirt, and sit down. Now relax. Never mind listening or watching for anything; just let your muscles go limp. Take easy, deep breaths. Focus entirely on the in and out of your breathing. Don’t let restlessness or thoughts of other matters creep back into your consciousness; stay relaxed and breathe slow and easy. Shhhh. Breathe easy. Relax. Stay still.
The technique may take several minutes (and several tries), but eventually that internal noise of yours will quiet down, and if you remain still the wildlife around you will forgive and forget your crashing. Soon enough the sounds of the forest normal will return. And soon too you will begin to notice the “notes” of individual players in the symphony: a skitter in a treetop; a chick-chick of tiny teeth gnawing on nut or bark; a tap-tap-tap of pointed beak on wood. Let your ears do the locating, then see if your eyes can zero in on the source. Most wildlife is much harder to see than to hear, by virtue of camouflage coloration and patterning, not to mention instinctive adeptness at concealment — a key to survival.
If you have trouble picking up or focusing on faint sounds, you can use an easy technique to boost your listening powers: Just cup your hands behind your ears and push them forward slightly with your thumbs and index fingers. In effect, you’re giving yourself bigger sound catchers. You’ll be surprised at how much more you can hear. Go ahead — try it now. Better yet, go outdoors and listen to a bird without your “new” ears, and then with them. The method is especially handy for pinpointing the direction from which a sound is coming — it’s like adding a zoom lens to your ears.
What Is That Sound?
The real art in woods-listening is not so much hearing sounds as it is identifying them. That loud rustling in the leaves — is it a scampering squirrel, or simply a brown thrasher living up to its name? That sharp snap of cracking wood — a twig surrendering to the weight of an approaching deer, or just a brittle branch giving in the wind? In the forest, even silence — a sudden stillness, perhaps caused by the passing of a predator — tells tales.
Most of us already command a considerable, if underused, vocabulary of known nature sounds. Some birds’ utterances virtually identify themselves — the whippoorwill’s repeated namesake call, the chickadee’s chick-a-dee-dee-dee, the crow’s caw, the bubbling goblgoblgobl of a wild tom turkey. Then there are the sounds familiar from our own back yards — the cardinal’s bright purdy-purdy-purdy, the robin’s whistling cheerup-cheery-cheerio-cheerup, the chattering chrrr of a scolding red squirrel. Other sounds are emblematic of one’s home region. Those who grew up in the Far North know the loon’s eerie wavering wails. A surprisingly similar but squeakier call, followed by two or three guttural grunts, signals westerners in the Rockies to the presence of an entirely different creature: a bugling bull elk.
Some sounds require no learning at all — you need never have heard a rattlesnake’s harsh rattle, a cougar’s throaty growl, or the no-nonsense gruff huff huff of a rankled grizzly or black bear to get the message loud and clear.
But more often than not, the sounds you hear outdoors are of a subtler or less identifiable sort. That small, barely visible bird making a quick, rolling tap-tap-tapping high in a tree: It’s a woodpecker drumming to attract a mate, yes, but is it a downy, or a hairy? (Downy woodpeckers drum rapidly, about 15 times a second — but hairy woodpeckers drum even faster, at nearly twice the speed, about 25 times a second.) That howl in the darkness — is it a dog, or a coyote? (Coyotes possess a distinctly higher-pitched voice than most dogs, and usually add yips and yaps to their songs.) In spring’s nightly frog chorale at the pond, the bullfrogs singing bass are obvious enough — but who are all those baritones and tenors, and which species are calling out which tunes? Just what kinds of insects are doing that buzzing, humming and rasping in complex rhythms on a summer’s eve?
Chances are you’ll never need, or want, to put names to every individual song maker you hear in the outdoors. There are, after all, nearly 70 species of “true” and “false” katydids in the United States and Canada, more than 40 species of ground and tree crickets and dozens of other sound-producing members of the insect family alone. And there are equally vast and confusing orchestras of birds, mammals, amphibians and others. But listening carefully to nature’s sounds — and learning at least some of the identities behind them — can help you begin to distinguish one sound from another, giving you a greater appreciation not only for specific songs but also for the astonishing depth and variety of our planet’s vast auditory repertoire.
Fortunately, the digital age has made it easier than ever to school yourself in Nature Sounds 101 and beyond. Excellent books, recordings and Web sites designed to help you learn the songs and calls of birds, frogs, toads, insects and other animals are available to the aspiring sound student — see “Natural Sound Bytes,” below, for a partial listing.
Lifelong Learning
Although books and other aids may be able to help, there’s no substitute for firsthand experience when it comes to any sort of nature appreciation. It’s not just an ability to identify sounds, but also an understanding of their meanings, that comes to those who spend time listening carefully. In the southern Appalachians, old-timers searching the backwoods for medicinal ginseng knew to follow the maniacal call of the “sang bird”: the pileated woodpecker, which once kept mostly to the rich, shaded cove habitat favored by that plant. In the West, veteran hunters have learned to discern the rustlings of mule deer traveling through brush from those of smaller whitetail deer that share the same range. Birdwatchers seeking day-roosting owls listen for the excited caws of mobbing crows, a good sign that the birds will be circling an owl (or hawk) squatting in a tree in their territory.
Only time and experience can give you the discriminating ear of the true woodsperson. It is a learning process, a listening process, a learning-some-more process. And there’s no time like now — when spring sparkles with the songs and sounds of renewal — to sit down, stay still, and perk up your ears.
