Quiet, please.
I'm trying to listen.
I wouldn’t explicitly refer to myself as a ‘birder’. At least, not in the die-hard, all-or-nothing self-identification of the keenest twitchers. But I try to pay attention, especially to birds I’m not familiar with.
Earlier in the summer, I took a trip to Slovenia. One afternoon I was out walking and heard the call of a bird I didn’t recognise. When it comes to unfamiliar birdsong there’s only one tool for the job: Merlin. It’s an app that tells you what the bird is by recording its birdsong and comparing the soundwaves to its database. It’s Shazam for birds. It’s a must-have for anyone stepping outside, let alone birders.
Although I could pick out the highest pitch notes of this particular song, the app wasn’t getting it. I realised pretty quickly that it was struggling to hear anything other than the tedious whine of the heavy traffic on the road I was on. The bird disappeared, and I ended up none the wiser of what I had been listening to. The traffic continued to roar.
And as I continued my walk, I realised the traffic was now all I could pay attention to. It had rained heavily the night before, and the tyres were making that horrendous hissing sound they make in wet weather as they swept along the rain-slicked tarmac.
Selective attention is a remarkable skill. You know how when you’re in a loud party and you can make out what the person opposite you is saying even though everyone else is talking and there’s music playing? That’s selective attention. Scientists reckon it’s a few neurons in the brain’s auditory stem that help us pick out particular sounds in a space using pitch1.
The inability to do this - where everything becomes a mess of noise and it’s impossible to hear anything - is called auditory processing disorder. Hyperacusis is a sensitivity to everyday sounds, making situations like that almost unbearable.
For the most part, our brains are adept at filtering out unwanted background noise, like traffic, or the planes flying overhead every 30 seconds, or your partner berating you for not closing the kitchen cupboard doors. But if you’re anything like me, when you notice a particular sound it can be difficult to let it go.
So for the rest of the walk I became irritable that all I could hear was the endless, monotonous whooshing of traffic again and again and again.
As I write this I realise I am at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, but… when did the world get so damn loud?
I’m sure traffic today is far busier than it was even a handful of years ago. The neighbours underneath us play music so loudly it shakes the walls. The building site next to my office sounds like an actual battlefield.
When I was a kid, playing music out loud on the bus was a serious faux pas. Sure, you could hear people’s tinny music through their headphones now and then, but they weren’t being deliberately disruptive. Yesterday I was on the bus and a full-grown, middle-aged woman was watching an entire episode of a TV show on her phone at full volume.
The number of times I’ve had to sit next near someone on public transport just scrolling through TikTok without headphones is astonishing to me. One particular train journey involved three separate people all watching videos out loud in the same carriage and it’s the closest I’ve ever come to ending up on the evening news. The worst thing is they seem to be completely oblivious that it might be the slightest bit irritating to other people. Two or three times I’ve asked someone to turn their phones down and they’ve just stared at me slack-jawed like they didn’t even fully understand where they were.
I bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones recently, not so I could listen to music uninterrupted but just so I could hear myself think.
A growing population and all of the associated ruckus is making the world a louder place. And that noise pollution is affecting our health, too. The European Environment Agency’s 2020 noise pollution report reveals at least one in five Europeans are currently exposed to noise levels considered harmful to their health2.
Health studies in Denmark revealed that traffic noise could be blamed for 8.5% of the diabetes cases in Denmark, and railway noise for 1.4%3. Prolonged exposure to continuous traffic noises increases the likeliood of stroke and heart conditions.
Don’t get me wrong, I love music. I love live music, I love the energy and buzz and sticky floors of rock concerts and the sounds of people chatting in the pub on a Sunday afternoon in the summer, but when a police helicopter hovers over my house in the middle of the night my blood pressure skyrockets.
A friend of mine recently shared with me this marvellous podcast Field Recordings, which features ambient soundscapes - often natural, always fascinating - taken by field recordists all over the world.
The recordings of the natural spaces are particularly relaxing and there is mounting evidence to suggest that even listening to nature is beneficial4 (I challenge you to find a meditation app that features leaf-blowers and washing machines instead of running water and birdsong). But they are also important documents of a space over time.
Because the natural world, unsurprisingly, has the opposite problem.
As we continue to decimate the beautiful places on Earth and replace them with multi-story car parks “for the economy”, the sounds of nature are fading. And birdsong and the buzzing of insects are only part of the story. This article about the acoustic signatures of ecosystems is required reading.
As technology develops, sound has become an increasingly important way of measuring the health and biodiversity of ecosystems: our forests, soils and oceans all produce their own acoustic signatures. Scientists who use ecoacoustics to measure habitats and species say that quiet is falling across thousands of habitats, as the planet witnesses extraordinary losses in the density and variety of species. Disappearing or losing volume along with them are many familiar sounds: the morning calls of birds, rustle of mammals through undergrowth and summer hum of insects.
Even in the deepest oceans, the endless human cacophony is taking over.
The sounds of ships disrupt the mating calls of whales and dolphins, the sounds of subsea oil and gas extraction disturb, confuse and even kill all kinds of marine life, and pollution has quietened our coral reefs - once the noisiest part of the oceans, the natural cities of the seas.
The dawn chorus on a fresh Spring morning is one of the absolute joys of our world. Around 20 years ago I did some work experience as an assistant ranger at my local country park and helped arrange the May Day dawn chorus walk. I didn’t record any of it, but listening to recordings of other dawn choruses it’s not difficult to imagine that even in those two decades things have quietened - in both volume and variety.
And that’s just in the short time I’ve been around. Shifting baseline syndrome is a phenomenon that explains a collective loss of memory over generations. The dawn chorus of my youth is radically different now, but I’m only comparing it with something that was already greatly depleted. The dawn chorus in the same place 50 years ago must have been deafening and magical. Go back another 50 years and it would have been like being on another planet.
This is why connection to and noticing the natural world is so important. Earth isn’t meant to be silent. It’s meant to be alive. The sounds of rustling leaves and cawing magpies and chittering robins and rummaging voles and splashing otters and grazing deer and whispering wind and streams lapping over shining pebbles are the sounds of a thriving Planet Earth. These are the sounds that homo sapiens are meant to tune into. But instead we listen to 3-second snippets of unrelated audio clips, and fill our brains with the white noise of the internet.
Last week, while out walking, I surprised myself by identifying a gaggle of long-tailed tits by their sounds before I saw them. I had always imagined birdwatching as being an activity where the use of binoculars is non-negotiable, but increasingly I think it should be referred to as bird listening. I hear them when I’m walking, I hear them when they’re squabbling in the tree outside my window. I hear whether they’re mating or fighting or just happy to be alive.
In today’s world of being always plugged in and switched on, the noise is deafening. How much of the discourse on the internet is worth paying attention to? How much of the 24-hour news cycle is worth listening to? I want to quieten my mind to listen and connect with a landscape, to give myself a sense of place and presence. If everyone did the same, we might hear something special - the cooing of a woodpigeon, the bubbling of a pond in Spring, the crackling of freshly fallen autumn leaves.
If we stopped making so much noise and just listened for a moment, we’d hear what the earth is trying to tell us.
We’d hear something worth listening to.
In case you missed it…
My film The Birdwatchers is available to watch online. I put a lot of time and energy (and money) into it, so if you’d like to see more projects like this, consider supporting Urban Nature Diary.
500% agree, but I confess to being a grumpy (and authentically) old woman! I lost the hearing in one ear in my mid teens due to illness but also gained very unwelcome tinnitus, live gigs were never the same after that! Over the decades I've learned to live with both but 10 years ago I was walking in woods at dusk with friends who were delighted to hear tawny owls. I would have been too but instead I was dismayed as I couldn't hear them at all; my 'good' ear's hearing was packing up. A hearing aid has helped with bird song - the generally high pitch picks up well - but in a crowded room of people the lack of smart neurons in my hearing aid can make for a miserable, and curiously anxiety-inducing experience. The Imperial College study suggests their discovery may help create better hearing aids, fingers crossed! But, 'plugged in' I too can hear long-tailed tits before I can see them - small blessings!
I’m always amazed that I am usually the only one going for a walk that isn’t listening to something on their phone. I grew up on a farm and will always be thankful that my Dad taught me to appreciate nature.