Wild Sounds

While reading this, I heard it was nominated for a Pulitzer. Great news, because this book about the evolution of sound needs its profile raised. It’s an utterly fascinating and necessary read. Life and sound are intimately wrapped together over millions of years. This is a book covering the soundscape from syrinx to larynx, from the sound-receptive cilia in our ears to the little file-like nobs on the legs of Orthoptera, from bugs to birds to us to whales.

Start with the sea. Jacques Cousteau’s famous 1956 documentary Le Monde du Silence about the oceans notwithstanding, the seas are very far from silent. In that very year, the biologist Mary Poland Fish, who had already been recording undersea sounds for years, wrote of the “din of animal life” underwater. (Fish was supported in her researches by the U.S. Navy, a monstrous irony considering that entity’s assault on underwater sound and life since.) Eventually Cousteau and his garçons caught up with the reality Haskell describes thusly:

“waters crackle and glow with choruses of snapping shrimp and other crustaceans. Fish, sometimes gathered by the tens of thousands on their breeding grounds, drum, twang, and purr. Marine mammals—seals, sea lions, walruses, dolphins, whales—click, boing, moan, and ring like bells. These sounds of life combine with the seethe of wind-stirred froth, the boom of colliding waves, and the groan and crack of ice sheets. Sound in water travels fast and far. Unlike on land, its energies flow unimpeded into animal bodies. Sound in oceans is ubiquitous and deeply felt by its creatures.”

With our shipping—we gotta have that piece of junk we’ll soon throw out delivered tomorrow, right?— and military activity, humans are both blurring out the diversity of ocean sounds and doing brutal damage to undersea lifeforms. “As we get louder and more voracious, we silence other living voices,” notes Haskell.

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Just a few listening notes:

I used to lead “Listening Tours” in early May. We would stand still and close our eyes and be surrounded by vocalizing birds. Then we’d move to a new spot and repeat. I did this in Prospect Park, which was originally built with sound-baffling berms to shut out the city noises. A sinuous path takes you away from the gray noise of the city, precisely as it was designed to do amid the din of nineteenth century traffic. The berms aren’t perfect; you actually can’t escape the sounds of the city. Added to the sound mix were choruses of bicycle racers looping the Drive, peacocks haunting the zoo.

From May to September, we listen for the Chimney Swifts overhead at dawn and dusk and the hours in between. Once I walked down a sandy road in Massachusetts into an envelopment of spring peepers rioting in early spring twilight. The sound throbbed inside me. Another time, on a country road in eastern Virginia, we looked for the bleating sheep we heard and realized it was frogs: narrow-mouthed toads (yes, they’re actually frogs) in the wet ditch.

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Haskell has, fittingly, an audio version of his story.