The Careful Art of Listening

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If you have trouble picking up or focusing on faint sounds, you can use an easy technique to boost your listening powers: Just cup your hands behind your ears and push them forward slightly with your thumbs and index fingers. In effect, you’re giving yourself bigger sound catchers. You’ll be surprised at how much more you can hear. Go ahead — try it now. Better yet, go outdoors and listen to a bird without your “new” ears, and then with them. The method is especially handy for pinpointing the direction from which a sound is coming — it’s like adding a zoom lens to your ears.

What Is That Sound?

The real art in woods-listening is not so much hearing sounds as it is identifying them. That loud rustling in the leaves — is it a scampering squirrel, or simply a brown thrasher living up to its name? That sharp snap of cracking wood — a twig surrendering to the weight of an approaching deer, or just a brittle branch giving in the wind? In the forest, even silence — a sudden stillness, perhaps caused by the passing of a predator — tells tales.

Most of us already command a considerable, if underused, vocabulary of known nature sounds. Some birds’ utterances virtually identify themselves — the whippoorwill’s repeated namesake call, the chickadee’s chick-a-dee-dee-dee, the crow’s caw, the bubbling goblgoblgobl of a wild tom turkey. Then there are the sounds familiar from our own back yards — the cardinal’s bright purdy-purdy-purdy, the robin’s whistling cheerup-cheery-cheerio-cheerup, the chattering chrrr of a scolding red squirrel. Other sounds are emblematic of one’s home region. Those who grew up in the Far North know the loon’s eerie wavering wails. A surprisingly similar but squeakier call, followed by two or three guttural grunts, signals westerners in the Rockies to the presence of an entirely different creature: a bugling bull elk.

Some sounds require no learning at all — you need never have heard a rattlesnake’s harsh rattle, a cougar’s throaty growl, or the no-nonsense gruff huff huff of a rankled grizzly or black bear to get the message loud and clear.

But more often than not, the sounds you hear outdoors are of a subtler or less identifiable sort. That small, barely visible bird making a quick, rolling tap-tap-tapping high in a tree: It’s a woodpecker drumming to attract a mate, yes, but is it a downy, or a hairy? (Downy woodpeckers drum rapidly, about 15 times a second — but hairy woodpeckers drum even faster, at nearly twice the speed, about 25 times a second.) That howl in the darkness — is it a dog, or a coyote? (Coyotes possess a distinctly higher-pitched voice than most dogs, and usually add yips and yaps to their songs.) In spring’s nightly frog chorale at the pond, the bullfrogs singing bass are obvious enough — but who are all those baritones and tenors, and which species are calling out which tunes? Just what kinds of insects are doing that buzzing, humming and rasping in complex rhythms on a summer’s eve?

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