Learning to listen
Excerpted from an article by Mary Taylor Young

Have you ever sat around a campfire after dark and listened to the night sounds? When the surrounding darkness and the light from the fire erase your powers of sight, the richness of the world of sound emerges.

But you don't have to enjoy listening only when your vision is restricted. We talk about bird watching and wildlife viewing, but listening is a marvelous way to experience another dimension of wildlife.

It sounds a little silly to tell people how to listen, but attentive listening is a skill that takes some practice.

When people lived close to nature, listening to the world around them was essential -- for finding food, for defense and just to keep tabs on what was going on around them.

But today a cacophony surrounds us in the modern world -- traffic, heavy equipment, television, radios, sirens, barking dogs -- blending into a mass of noise we want to ignore. We've trained ourselves to tune out much of the sounds around us.

To hear wildlife and the sounds of nature, we must now train ourselves to tune in.

Birders -- people with a serious interest in birdwatching -- often have excellent listening skills. Because birds are frequently difficult to see, birders learn to listen as well as watch. Sound is often the primary sense for locating birds, as birders zero in first by ear and then search with their binoculars. Even then, they may never get a good look at their quarry, which is often high in trees obscured by foliage.

So birders learn not just to listen, but to identify birds by their calls and songs. That trained ear kept tuned to sounds around them means their conversation is often interrupted with, "Oh, did you just hear that downy woodpecker fly across the yard?... Listen, there's a song sparrow!... Wasn't that a western screechowl?"

While birders listen in order to identify the sound, many of us don't have any particular mission other than enjoying what we hear. To practice listening, go in your backyard, or somewhere outdoors, sit down and close your eyes. Pay attention to all you hear. Practice locating the source of sounds by turning your head. Now go through the same exercise with your eyes open, but focusing on your sense of hearing rather than sight.

When you go out in the field, you can listen while on the move, but sitting quietly will be more productive. Once you are still, wildlife that may have fled or hidden at your approach will re-emerge.

One day while on a hike, I sat down to rest and soon heard scratching and rustling nearby. I was in the open with no creatures in sight. Suddenly the soil trembled and up popped a pocket gopher, which busily bulldozed out a load of dirt and submerged again to keep tunneling. I would not have seen or heard the gopher, an animal rarely if ever seen, if I'd been on the move.

Humans have woefully small external ears, so lots of sounds pass us by. Compare our flat-to-the-head ears to the radar-dish ears of a fox, mule deer or bigeared bat. You can vastly improve your ability to capture sounds by cupping your hands around your ears. Pivot slowly (remember that radar dish) and use the changes in volume and amount of sound to either ear to pinpoint the source of what you're hearing. When it seems each ear is receiving sound equally, you are looking straight at your target.

Owls, which can hunt completely by sound, use the same technique to locate prey. As the owl orients its head to equalize sound to its ears (which, unlike ours, are asymmetrical), the source of the sound is aligned to the bird's line of vision, and it targets in for the attack. Owls can pinpoint and strike a prey animal accurately to within a fraction of an inch, even in total darkness, using only sound.

One trick used by birders to locate a hidden bird by sound is a basic form of triangulation. The people in the group spread apart, then all listen to the sound. As they pinpoint the direction, each listener raises an arm and points to it. The place where lines from all the pointing arms come together is the likely location of the hidden bird.

Some nature centers have specialized microphones they use to listen to nature sounds, often on nighttime walks. These highly sensitive listening devices have a large dish surrounding a parabolic microphone. When pointed at sounds, or even used to scan a forest or meadow, they amplify an amazing variety of sounds that are too quiet or distant to be heard by the average human ear. These aids to hearing let us experience the world of sound familiar to so many animals but usually closed to humans.

Some birders and nature enthusiasts play tapes of bird songs and calls to elicit response from wild birds. Tapes are particularly used to find owls, which are secretive and nocturnal. This technique can have a negative effect on birds, however. During the nesting season, birds might expend energy responding to what they think is an intruder in their territory. The overplaying of tapes can stress birds enough to cause them to abandon nests. Better to just enjoy the night sounds and count any owls we hear naturally as a wonderful gift.

Your Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary is filled with the sounds of wildlife. Often they are the sounds of everyday life in the natural world -- rustles and scuffles, alarm calls, wingbeats, splashing -- that clue us to the animals around us. Much of the noise of nature is associated with specific seasons and behaviors.

Springtime brings the sounds of romance and territorialism. Of all these, the songs of birds are perhaps the most familiar and best loved. Songs are usually standardized series of notes or phrases typical to a species and used to define territory and attract mates. That's why the singing of birds is heard mainly in spring and summer, the seasons of courtship and rearing of young, but not in winter.

Bird calls, on the other hand, have practical function -- to warn of danger, to announce capture of prey, to protest disturbance or to communicate in other ways -- and are therefore heard throughout the year. The familiar tsik-a-dee of the chickadee is not its song but its call. A whistling, two-toned fee bee is the bird's song. A feeding flock of chickadee gives continuous calls, the members keeping in touch with each other as they forage for food.

Not all the sounds of bird courtship and territoriality are vocal. Being shy on musical voice but very good in the hammering department, woodpeckers drum with their bills on resonant surfaces -- dead trees, telephone poles, metal roof flashing -- to announce their territories and attract mates. Snipes "winnow," producing an airy whuh, whuh, whuh flight sound as air rushes through the fanned feathers of their tails. Nighthawks "boom," another flight sound made as the bird plummets downward then curves up suddenly in a "J" pattern, the air forced through its wing feathers making a loud szhoomp. Listen for snipes over wet meadows nearby statewide in spring and summer and nighthawks in morning and evening in most habitat across the state in summer, including urban areas.

Birds aren't the only animals vocalizing during the breeding season. Frogs and toads croak, sing and trill, the rising drone of their calls sometimes heard for a mile or more. The chorus frog sounds like someone running a thumb down a comb, rising in pitch. The Woodhouse toad gives a very loud, bawling Waaab! The bullfrog's song is a deep, loud Jug o rum. The leopard frog offers up a long snore, tapering to a series of croaks. The spadefoot toad emits a series of distinct quacks at one-second intervals. The western toad makes a soft chirping, like the cheeps of a baby chick.

In autumn, the eerie bugle of the bull elk, starting deep and hollow and rising to a shrill scream, echoes through mountain forests and meadows. With his bugle the bull challenges competing males and announces his readiness to breed. Later in the season, in late November and December, lucky listeners may hear the clash of horns as bighorn sheep rams battle each other during the rut. The crash of two rams battering head to head can sometimes be heard a mile or more away.

Encountering interesting sounds, and the sights they lead to, is often serendipitous when we are on the trail or just poking around outdoors. Pay attention to sudden changes in wildlife sounds. If a lively woodland grows suddenly quiet, or a silent place explodes in chatter or alarm calls, it probably means something is afoot, perhaps the approach of a predator or your own nearness to a nest.

In mid-summer the frenzied chatter of a songbird may be a fledgling bird, one that has just left the nest, still begging its harried parents for food -- Feed me! Feed me! The furious scolding of a squirrel announces that you are trespassing, and doesn't subside till you have passed through its territory. Rustling in dry leaves and underbrush may make you think a large animal hides just off the trail, but often these sounds are much larger than the animals that make them. Spotted towhees, songbirds about the size of slender robins, scuffle in the leaf litter looking for grubs and insects, making enough noise for an army of imagined predators.

If you are near a herd of elk, you may hear all sorts of chatter. Elk are quite vocal -- the calves mew, the adults grunt and "talk" to each other. A herd of elk feeding or moving through a forest can be very noisy, walking over things and rustling in the vegetation; when elk want to escape, though, they can do so very quietly.

Listen for sounds of alarm in nature. Deer may stamp a foot and snort an alarm before fleeing. The beaver's noisy slap of its flat tail on the water is a warning that carries far across the water to other beavers. Many birds cry alarms when nests are threatened. The rattlesnake's alarm is one sound you may not be eager to hear, but be glad of the warning that rattling tail gives.

Of all the sounds of Washington wildlife perhaps none is so evocative as the cry of the song dog. Though coyotes are not always seen, when their howling rises in the night, the sound touches a chord inside us -- a yearning for wild things -- that is stronger than any visual image.

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