When I was in my twenties, I could work just fine—maybe even better—while listening to (very loud) music. Later on music became distracting but I liked to work at coffee shops, where the chatter and bustle complemented rather than intruded. Yet even that eventually became something to block out when I needed to focus; likewise the hum of news radio.
The sound of nature, though, has never felt distracting or cognitively draining. Maybe that’s because evolution has fine-tuned life’s symphony, and our perception of it, since ears evolved several hundred million years ago. Although I’m usually skeptical of sociobiological explanations—it’s easy to concoct just-so stories for most any behavior—the sounds of ecosystems really do fit together like pieces of a puzzle, and it makes intuitive sense that we take aesthetic pleasure in stimuli that are relevant to our survival. Enjoying the sound of wind rustling in leaves could be evolution’s way of gently encouraging animals to notice their surroundings.
Whatever the reason, natural soundscapes simply feel right, and recording them has become a small hobby: a way of capturing times and places in sound rather than image, and then having something to listen to while I work. I thought that I’d use this newsletter to share some of these recordings … and here is the first!
I made it several weeks ago, after my friend Kathy—who you should follow if you’re on Instagram—took me to a nearby beaver marsh. I left my recorder there overnight, on a ridge between adjoining beaver ponds, and the recording spans the night’s final frogs and the dawn chorus of birds. It’s not super fancy or anything, and my equipment and technique is far from professional, but it’s still a late spring morning at a beaver pond.
Good Reads
On the subject of beavers: Back in 2010 I read about the world's largest beaver dam—a decades-old, half-mile-long infrastructural marvel in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park. I wanted to write about it, but the dam was so remote as to be inaccessible. (No human being had even been there; the dam was identified from satellite images.)
Late last year Ian Frazier wrote this fine story about the dam—and the one (human) person to visit—for Yale E360. What I’m most curious about these days: How do those beavers think about the dam? Do they have cultural knowledge of it, even traditions? What meaning might it have for them? There’s probably no way of knowing, but it’s fun to think about.
Book News
Two early reviews for Meet the Neighbors! One from Publisher’s Weekly, the other from Kirkus Reviews—publications little-known to the general public, including myself, but quite important to people in the industry. Publisher’s Weekly gave Neighbors a starred review, calling it “a potent complement to Martha C. Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals,” while Kirkus described it as “a comprehensive guide to thinking of animals not as anonymous creatures, but as individuals.”
Kirkus also shouted out to the “delightful pen-and-ink illustrations” of Mattias Lanas, which made me especially glad. The illustrations were my homage to the nature books I loved when I was growing up, and Mattias knocked them out of the park.
I had several stamps made from his drawings, and though I worried that the detail wouldn’t transfer to a new medium, they came out beautifully. If you’d like a stamped bookplate (and raccoon portrait!) then pre-order Meet the Neighbors through this link.
Events
Starting next Wednesday, June 26 I’ll be teaching a three-session course for Roundtable, the online education arm of the 92nd Street Y, a New York City-based public intellectual institution.
The first session will be about the science of animal intelligence. In the second, I’ll place that science within its historical and social context: the grand saga of how we came to think about animals the way we do. And in Part III I’ll dive into what people are doing with these insights: new ways of seeing and thinking about animals, and how they’re taking shape in the world.
Sign up! Tell a friend!
Be well, everyone—
Brandon
This is so interesting and as always I love your writing. Your recordings are so cool, what a great idea! I want to try this. I’ve been reading and listening to some folk who do nature recordings.
Like Gordon Hempton, and the One Square Inch of Silence Foundation, now Quiet Parks International aiming to preserve places that are quiet, which is to say free of human noise, very hard to find.
And of course Seán Ronayne, who does the Irish Wildlife Sounds project.
The idea that our ears not only find pleasure in those sounds that nourish us (such as running water) evolutionally, but that our brain tunes out hundreds of other sounds that we hear but don’t know we hear, is so interesting.
Your recording sounds like a jazz ensemble from some jiving birds and critters, I love it.
I loved the recording and so did Arya the Cockatiel, my avian companion. The world's largest beaver dam is almost a half-mile long inside a national park that is the largest in Canada and the second largest in the world, located in northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories.
Beavers are called Nature's hydro engineers for solid reasons And they are as cute as they are diligent.
As for animal intelligence, we humans are slowly finding out how intelligent non-human animals truly are. I often observe Arya observing me. Bird brain is a high complment, indeed.
Thank you for this post. Very enjoyable.