Birdsong

I love to wake to the sound of birdsong. I am able to recognize the songs of only a handful of particular bird species, but I am ready to learn more. One morning in the mountains, I finally make the move. Called by the avian community choir outside my open window, I get myself out of bed, pick up my mobile phone, and download the birdsong app, Merlin. And over the next few minutes I find out that I am hearing indigo bunting, Carolina wren, song sparrow, mourning dove, American robin, blue jay, crow, and field sparrow.

And over the next few days I add cardinal and eastern towhee to the list. I begin to discern the songs of various birds, especially the robin and the indigo bunting, whose seem to be singing more than the rest combined.

I have seen these birds in the woods and the meadow—except for the indigo bunting. The robins are particularly visible to us as they fly over the tops of meadow wildflowers and land on the grass, we assume, to find their worm and bug dinners. Cardinals and jays occasionally fly higher up, past us as we sit on the porch. I see brown birds up in the tree tops that are too far away for me to identify precisely. I go out with my camera to find an indigo bunting, hoping to get a glimpse of the brightly feathered male whose color closely matches the blue hue of my house. I never do see one, however.

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There is another sound I hear in this place that I do NOT love, loud traffic noise. Scientists call this anthropogenic, or human-generated, noise. So many cars and motorcycles and small and big trucks speed by in both directions. Many of the motorcycles and the trucks are juiced up to make especially loud noises. The house is 50 yards off the road, but sometimes the din is so great that it is difficult to converse with someone sitting in my house with me or over the phone. I feel the roar and the clatter rip through my body. It raises my stress level while I’m trying to work. Much of it is unnecessary. I could put earplugs in my ears, but then I could not hear the sounds I want to hear, the birds singing, or the creek flowing, or the rain falling.

This road was here when I was visiting my grandmother as a child. It is a two-lane highway that follows an ancient path cut out of the curves of the mountain. It is not likely to ever be widened, which is a good thing. It was a busy road when I was young, and a source of worry for my grandmother, vis a vis her grandchildren getting run over by a runaway car.

But it was not as busy, and the cars weren’t as loud. I don’t ever remember not being able to carry on a conversation on my grandparents’ front porch because of a tortured muffler or the clanking chains of overloaded trucks as they hit the dip the road. There were no explosions of motorcycle convoys coming around the mountain.

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As I am out walking in the meadow and the woods, I ask myself, “If this traffic noise causes stress in my body, I think, how does it make these trees feel?” People suggest growing more trees along the road as a buffer against the noise, but now I’m worried about what all this noise will do to the trees and everything that lives around them. I have planted a dozen new trees to add new species to this small but abundant eco-system. I wonder if I should be subjecting them to this toxic soundscape. I hope, however, that their growing presence will help buffer the effects of the noise not just for me but also for life in the woods, creek, and meadow.

I go looking for research on the effects of noise on the trees. A study conducted in New Mexico found that in areas where natural gas companies used noisy compressors as part of their extraction process, there were 75% fewer piñon pine seeds and saplings compared to quiet sites where they did not use the compressors. Piñons depend on scrub jays to carry their pine seeds away from the parent tree, and scrub jays are known to sensitive to and to avoid noise. Scientists believe this decline in pinon trees occurred because of avoidance of these noisy areas by the jays.  A dozen years later, after the compressors had been removed from the study sites, a follow-up study conducted by the same scientists found a persistent decrease in pinon pine saplings in this now quiet area. Investigators hypothesize that this is because the scrub jay has not returned to the formerly noisy area and so is not planting the seeds as they once did. It is likely that it will take some time for these birds to return to previously noisy areas.

 “The effects of human noise pollution are growing into the structure of these woodland communities,” said Clint Francis, senior author of the study. “What we’re seeing is that removal of the noise doesn't necessarily immediately result in a recovery of ecological function.” Decreases in the seedlings of junipers and other flowering plants were also found in formerly noisy sites compared to quiet ones. “Our results reveal that plant communities change in lots of ways with noise exposure,” Francis said.

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And what about the changes caused by man-made noise on animal communities, particularly birds and insects? Research has demonstrated its deleterious effects on animal physiology, leading to less healthy animals. And added noise drowns out animal attempts to communicate with each other, which means their ability to find a mate, raise an alarm, find food, or defend against predators is impaired, functions critical to their survival. You can read academic summaries of some of this research here and here.

I want human noise to go away so I can hear sweet birdsong and also the buzzing of insects, and all the other sounds of abundant life around me. For these dear creatures, however, the roar of truck and motorcycle engines is one more threat to survival. The rapidly increasing mass extinction of plant and animal species is not salient to the lives of most humans, so disconnected from the other than human world. It is not something they/we see day-to-day. But I do believe that if my grandmother and grandfather were to step into their front yard and looked with their 30-year-old eyes over the field they once farmed and into these woods, they would know something is different, something is not quite right.

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For the moment, until I can figure out what else I can do, I am going to bear witness to what is here now and alive—bees buzzing, the towering oak trees, the mint growing in the creek, the swallowtail butterflies as they collapse themselves all the way into the delicate white bindweed flowers threading their way across the meadow, the whole web of life that spreads itself out before me. And I’m going to find those gorgeous indigo buntings that sing me awake in the morning.

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Thanks to Patrice Bouchard on Unsplash for the use of the photo of the indigo bunting in the cover photo collage.