Sounds Wild and Broken, page 15
How to judge environmental change? We assess surroundings through our aesthetic responses. This is an especially profound experience if we have years of lived, sensory experience with a place. Sometimes, we are driven into grief by the ugliness of despoiled rivers, forests, and neighborhoods. But we can also feel a sense of gorgeous rightness at the emergence of new life congruent with the biological character of a place. Aesthetics are one of the roots of environmental ethics, powerfully instructive and motivating.
Who does good work? There is beauty in craft, artistry, innovation, diligence, and persistence. We see this in the labor of others; we aspire to it in ourselves; and we have an aesthetic response to both the products and processes of work.
How to behave? We live embedded within webs of relationships and we instantly recognize when actions within that network are beautiful or ugly. We feel this deeply, and our aesthetic response guides both our own behavior and our reaction to others. Moral judgment of human behavior is tightly associated with the aesthetics of relationship.
Are we thriving? We also find beauty in the laughs and smiles of newborn babies, the wise and kindly advice of elders, the astonishing development of skills in children and young adults, and the sense of possibility for the future.
In all these cases, aesthetic judgment emerges from an integration of the senses with our intellect, subconscious, and emotions. A deep experience of beauty draws together genetic inheritance, lived experience, the teachings of our culture, and the bodily experience of the moment. In doing so, an experience of beauty can be a great truth teller and motivator, more powerful than senses, memory, reason, or emotion acting alone. When experiencing beauty, multiple parts of our brains light up, a network of connection among disparate neural centers. The parts of the brain associated with emotion and motivation are activated, as are motor centers. Feeling and action. No wonder that experiences of beauty bond people—as mates, families, cultures—and motivate us to act on behalf of what we’ve learned through aesthetic experience. Beauty inspires us to connect, care, and act.
Why should this be? In The Songs of Trees, I suggest that through profound experiences of beauty, we, in Iris Murdoch’s word, “unself.” We connect what is within us to the collective experience of others, to both members of our own species and our nonhuman kin. Such opening allows us to partly transcend the narrow walls of the self. Because all life is made from connection and relationship, getting outside of our heads and bodies is necessary to understand the world. Beauty, therefore, is a reward and guide built by evolution to help us pay attention to what matters. The experience of beauty has many forms because there is much in the world that needs attending to, and each context demands its own aesthetic.
The ancestors that bequeathed us their genes found beauty in a safe and fertile landscape, in right relationships among companions, in work done well, in the fruits of creativity, in the body of a lover, and in the giggling smiles of babies. All these experiences of beauty guided our forebears into relationship and action, and thus survival. In giving us an internal glow when we connect to the otherness of people, animals, plants, landscapes, and ideas, beauty feeds and grounds subjective experience via tendrils that run out into the objective world. Aesthetics—the appreciation and consideration of the perceptions of the senses—is a guide and a motivator to find truths beyond the self.
In our unrooted and industrialized world, beauty can also be a deceiver. We often isolate our senses from the consequences of our actions, creating bubbles of pleasing experience built on ugliness elsewhere that might give us pause if we could sense it directly. This is most obvious with international trade. The beautiful objects and foods in our lives sometimes come from places of exploitation. Even soundscapes can be misleading. In the outer suburbs, gentle sounds of insects and birdsong in trees soothe us. Yet this experience is possible only because of the traffic-filled highway that brings us and our goods to sonic oases, and the noise of mines and factories needed to build the extensive infrastructure networks that enable and sustain low-density suburbia. In seeking sensory calm and connection to other species, we can paradoxically increase the sum of human noise in the world. The dislocating power of fossil fuels drives much of this separation between our senses and the consequences of our actions.
One of the perils of our time, then, is that we can find satisfying beauty in experiences that hide fragmentation, destruction, and incoherence. Evolution has built us in thrall to the power of aesthetic experiences. We cannot escape this, our nature. Nor can we easily escape the industrial structures in which our lives are embedded. But we can try to listen, rooting our aesthetic sense in life’s community. What a delight it is to feel those roots ramify and learn.
And so I return to the spring peepers’ chilly swamp to open my ears. I come here to be renewed by their sound, a spring ritual. I’m motivated by a desire to slake my winter-parched ears with the sounds of the forest. Beyond this immediate pleasure, in ways unknowable in the moment, I also let the lives of other species into my body and psyche. In this opening, there is the possibility of more knowledge and connection. But, mostly, I listen to enjoy. This is evolution’s gift to us. The labor of gathering and integrating knowledge, essential work for animal survival and flourishing, is a pleasure. Aesthetic experience rewards us in the moment. In satisfying our hunger for immediate gratification, we also serve evolution’s long game. In a world in tumult, might we accept our ancestors’ gift and listen?
Vocal Learning and Culture
Midsummer. Bright sun. Yet the air has a snowy bite. Gusting wind and loose rock underfoot make me stumble. I clutch at my breath. In the thin air, my thighs burn and ache with anaerobic effort. In another hour, I’ll be trudging four-steps-pause-breathe, four-steps-pause-breathe, a rhythm imposed by the mountain on lowlanders who presume to approach the four-thousand-meter peak, one of the knobby vertebrae along the high spine of the Rocky Mountains.
In the high plains to the east of this Colorado mountain, browned prairie grasses have set seed, and fledgling meadowlarks squall openmouthed as they pursue their parents. For prairie plants and animals alike, the summer season of parental provisioning has come. But here on the mountain, spring just began. Snowfields persist in a few spots. Elsewhere, floral profusion. After nine months of snow and ice, light and water raise from the stony ground a great abundance of blooms, each one a defiant reply to winter’s long duress.
No plant grows higher than my knees on this tundra. Alpine sunflower and stemless daisy hold palm-sized gold and lemon flowers on stalks only as long as my finger. Ten paces carry me past hundreds of these glowing disks. Among them, moss campion mounds its narrow dark green leaves, forming spongelike puffs topped with dozens of pink-purple flowers, each bloom the size of a large raindrop. Alpine sandwort displays white flowers of similar size, emerging from a centimeter-high mat of tiny fleshy leaves. Above these creeping forms, mountain buckwheat holds flowers aloft, on slender stems crowned with torch-like clusters of hundreds of minuscule flowers. This buckwheat is a giant among the dozens of wildflowers here, reaching ankle height. Miniature avens, asters, waterleafs, and phlox add varied purple hues. Most plants have stems densely matted with silver hair. This felt protects them from wind and ultraviolet light and, along with the darkness of foliage, traps heat, quickening the plants’ inner chemistry in the short growing season. Flowers are heat catchers too, warming their nectar and offering visiting insects sips of sweet alpine hot toddies.
This carpet of miniature flowers is interspersed with shrubby alpine and snowy willows. They grow in tidy knee-high mounds, smooth edged, seeming to flow through swales and to fill small basins, clinging to the lowest, wettest parts of the terrain. Like the wildflowers, the willows’ stems and leaves are fuzzy. Every plant is festooned with spiky green baubles that enclose the developing seeds. The willows bloomed before their leaves emerged, when snow first started to melt, welcoming on warmer days the year’s first ants, bees, and flies with pollen and nectar.
Subalpine fir, a tree that lances twenty or more meters high at lower elevations, maintains an outpost of crouched, windswept trees here. Every individual is pressed to the ground, growing from trunks turned horizontal. Branches sprout thickly around these recumbent spines, making each tree a flattened, elongate thicket, impenetrable to human limbs. A few of these low trees send up meter-high vertical shoots, testing the air in a bid to escape their creeping life on the ground. All of these sprouts are dead, killed by the ice-blast of wind, and they stand like desolate flagpoles, the prevailing wind’s direction recorded in the tattered brown remains of twigs pointing leeward.
Thousands of flowers within arm’s reach. Tens of thousands within eyesight. This is botanical hard liquor, alpine amaro, floral wonders distilled into a layer just centimeters high: foliage rosettes, scalloped petal edges, elegant rhythms of stem architecture, and dozens of leaf shapes. My eyes, used to a world on a larger scale, implore me to lie down, to get close and imbibe. Prostration is impossible without crushing the delicate blooms or impaling myself on a jagged stone, and so I hunker down on the worn mountain trail, dizzy from oxygen starvation and the floral marvels of tundra springtime. Many of these diminutive plants are old, some living upward of two centuries, yearly renewing their delicate aboveground greenery from sturdy, deep-buried roots.
We call this place tree line, a boundary, but there is no sharp edge, only a carpeted mosaic of species that thrive where woody vegetation meets its limits. A few plants extend their populations higher, close to the summit, but most dwell in a band where clumps of fir and willow blend with open tundra. Ascending the mountain, it takes an hour, at most, to walk through this world. But this narrow elevational range belies the magnitude of the habitat. Plants here live all along the high Rocky Mountains, then across the vast treeless tundra of the Northern Hemisphere. Moss campion, for example, here confined to a small section of the trail, lives in the mountain ranges of North America, Europe, and Asia, and is common on the open tundra that circles the Arctic.
Wind is the dominant sound here, either its hiss and slap as it scours past my ears or in the roar of fir, spruce, and limber pine that carries up from lower elevations. In the lulls between gusts, animal voices find their way through: the wing whir of bumblebees; the croaks of ravens surfing wind eddies over mountain ridges; the ewk! of pikas from adjacent rock screes; and the pitpitpit call of American pipits winging across the open tundra, seeking insects to fuel their egg laying and courting. Into these relatively simple sounds, from atop one of the ragged fir flags, comes a more ornate melody. A steady introductory note, a higher buzz, a trill, then three downsweeps, the whole phrase unfolding in just two seconds. The song repeats, then another voice answers from a willow shrub twenty meters away, and a third from a fir thicket downslope. The songs are complex but not jumbled. The purity of tone and finely wrought structure are full of light and delicacy. A figure skater of sound: Two long, sliding strokes, a rise into a spin and twirl, and quick foot sweeps on landing. Control. Speed. Elegance. A striking contrast to the disordered wind.
The singers are white-crowned sparrows setting up territories for a hurried breeding season in the high country. These birds spend most of the year in their wintering grounds at lower elevations in the mountains and, for some, in the open scrubby vegetation south of here in New Mexico and Texas. Their brown-and-black-streaked backs and gray chests blend with the vegetation, but their head pattern pops. Bold black-on-white stripes run back across the entire head, a beacon amid the greens and grays. Even at the edge of my eyes’ resolution, gazing across a hundred meters of tundra, I see the banded heads as they bob and fly.
This seems an extreme environment for a songbird, but from their perspective this mountain slope combines many advantages. The brief summer brings a surge of insect food with little competition. The wildflowers and grasses will shortly offer abundant seed, enough to draw forest birds like siskins and juncos from the lower elevations to the summer feast. Moisture is easy to find in the rivulets that run down from melting snow, a rare luxury in this arid continental interior. And although they are conspicuous when they sing from their elevated perches, at the first sign of danger from hunting goshawks they can drop into vegetation as dense as the thickest lowland briar patch, vegetation that also protects nests from the eyes of ravens.
Male and female white-crowned sparrows are indistinguishable to the human eye, and their bold head patterns serve as social and sexual signals for both sexes. The stripes communicate the birds’ presence, health, and in subtle variations of raised crown feathers, moods, from spiky-headed agitation, to flat-crowned alarm, to dome-headed relaxation. In the breeding season, most singers are territorial males, and some females also sing to defend their food patches or to drive away rivals.
From my seat on the stony trail, I listen to the birds and am struck by how each song has its own pitch and structure. Individuality is immediately apparent. The first bird, its feet grasping the dead fir shoot, starts high, on a note my sound recorder will later peg at four and a half kilohertz, just above the top note on the piano. This pure, steady introduction flips into a buzzy sound at about the same frequency, then a metallic trill. Three notes at the end dart down from five to three kilohertz. Eee-bree-tree-tewtewtew. The singer on the willow starts much lower, three kilohertz, and so is recognizable from the first moment of song. The song’s buzz jumps up in frequency, then moves directly to two sweeps, omitting the trill. Bee-bree-tewtew. From the downslope fir, the third bird gives another arrangement, starting between the others, three and a half kilohertz, then a higher buzz, a hard chip note, a trill, and five sweeps. Eee-bree-chip-tree-tewtewtewtewtew. Over the next several minutes, the birds sing back and forth, sometimes seeming to answer one another, sometimes overlapping their phrases. Each bird sticks with its song, repeating distinctive frequencies and arrangement of parts.
With just a few minutes of attention, I come to know the locals on this patch of tundra.
* * *
—
Mori Point, California, just south of downtown San Francisco. The headland cleaves incoming swells from the Pacific Ocean, presenting a hard edge for waves that have traveled uninterrupted for hundreds of kilometers. The water’s energies dissipate in bellows from cliff faces and in the seethe of waves on a pebble beach. Out of the fog comes a row of pelicans, their oaring wingbeats synchronized as they fly north, parallel to the shore.
From one of the many waist-high thickets of coyote brush, a white-crowned sparrow sings. I recognize the introductory pure tone followed by buzzes and sweeps, but the pattern is unlike anything I’ve heard in the mountains. The introduction is divided into two notes, the trill is gone, and the song concludes with extra notes, tight concluding accents, eee-eee bree-tewtewtew-chuchuchu. Another bird answers, again with a two-note introduction. The second part is a little higher, with fewer sweeps and concluding chips, eee-EEE-bree-tewtew-chuchu. Like the mountain birds, each bird repeats its song, staying faithful to its variations of pitch and arrangement of phrases. The birds here seem to agree on some stylistic elements, a divided opening and an ornamented ending, but then carve out individual variants.
Later the same day, north of Mori Point, I listen at Crossover Drive in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Six lanes of traffic cut through the park. Brake squeals, horn blasts, and an enveloping throb of engines define the soundscape here. In the shrubs next to an encampment of unhoused people adjacent to this traffic artery, a white-crowned sparrow sings. One long note, then seven sweeps. No ornaments or buzzes. Eee-tewtewtewtewtewtewtew. I walk west, along the paved promenade, away from the traffic noise. Two more sparrows sing from bushes near patches of unkempt grass. Like the first, they start with a single note, omit any buzzes, and give multiple sweeps, ten or more for both. They also break the string of sweeps into two, the first part a higher and more emphatic Stee! than the last, tew. One bird gives more repeats of Stee and the other more of tew.
Back at home, I swing open my laptop and, with the help of thousands of microphone-wielding bird watchers, take an imaginative journey into variations in these sparrows’ songs across North America. Two websites are my portals. Both are collections of field recordings uploaded by enthusiasts, assembled into vast databases of sound. Scientists at the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have been gathering and archiving sound since the 1920s. Their work and that of volunteer contributors now number over 175,000 field recordings. Xeno-canto, a website started by Dutch ornithologists in 2005, gathers recordings from bird watchers and scientists worldwide. Its archive now counts more than 500,000 entries. Within each archive, snapshots of sound are held in the electric charges of billions of microchip capacitors and transistors. In a click, my ears fly across these silicon memories of life’s conversations.
The first search result from the Macaulay Library is from the Denali Highway, Alaska. On June 14, 2015, Bob McGuire recorded a sparrow with two introductory notes, the second note with two rapid wavers in the middle of its steady tone, ending in three buzzes that step up then down in frequency. Eee-eee-diddle-wee-bee-too. No sweeps, no trills. Compared with Colorado and California birds, this is a reshuffle spiked with the diddle innovation. I zoom to Alaska on the Xeno-canto map and click on the colored dots that locate sound recordings in the database. I imagine the recordists standing in the brisk Alaskan summer, breathing willow, fir, and spruce aromas as the birds sing. Each recording is a moment captured and shared as humans reach out to understand and honor other species. The birds in these recordings all sing variations of the song that McGuire recorded, each one distinguished by the frequencies of its introductory note and buzzes, but all sharing the same overall pattern. I scroll west to Nome and east to the Yukon, leaping over mountain ranges with a sweep of my hand, and hear the same overall singing style, with some Nome birds turning the second note into a warble.
