Listening

Last Sunday, I led a group of twenty on what I called the Listening Tour in Prospect Park. The tour was sponsored by Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room, which is currently hosting an exhibition called “Paradise.” We were in Prospect for the simple reason that it is a paradise of birds. A 6 a.m. start was planned to maximize bird sounds and minimize human sounds. Luckily, dawn broke on a gloriously mild day. May Day, as it happened; there was another group gathered at the Grand Army Plaza entrance, there to raise a May Pole.

I’d wanted us to be silent and unplugged, to experience the park’s sounds, not ourselves, so we didn’t speak as we walked through the Vale and into the Midwood and then back, pausing in several places to just listen. Simple, but often we have to make the effort. Songs, calls, and other sounds (wing claps, woodpecker taps) of birds, as well as other sounds (squirrel acrobatics, rushing water) filled our ears. Except for a few whispered instructions from myself, we largely kept silent for a whole 90 minutes. We weren’t there to identify birds, just to listen (causing some confusion among a few birders we ran into). Some of us closed our eyes so as to not be distracted by the visual world.

The sounds can fill you up when you take the time to listen. In the city, we live surrounded by so much noise we forget how sharp our hearing can be. Dozens of bird species were vocalizing, some, just like people, louder and more strident than others. In the Midwood, we heard the mournful wail of the Indian peafowl in the zoo.

At the end, back in the Vale, we watched the May Pole people singing and dancing and weaving their ribbons. Human song ended our concert of animal sound.