[Music]
[Music]
when we listen to each other we do so to
understand and share our feelings and
it’s similar with nature the sounds of
nature are reaching information and when
we listen we can find a personal
connection with with life around us so
today I would like to invite you to
listen more deeply to nature and I’m
going to share a little of what I’ve
come to understand by doing so and I’ll
begin with bird song because birds are
acoustic creatures and they create the
most extraordinary variety of sounds
they do so with their unique vocal organ
called the syrinx and when you consider
just how significant bird song is to
them you can appreciate that the
evolution of the syrinx is important for
them as the development of feathers and
flight itself this is the European
nightingale famed for its song I’ve got
to admit when I first encountered them I
was a little disappointed I thought they
sounded a bit twittery however as I
listened more deeply I could hear that
he was a bird that poured out its spirit
in song of such richness and diversity
and variety and dare I say it creativity
now in playing this to you I’d like to
introduce spectrograms a spectrogram is
a visual representation of what your
hearings with time progressing
horizontally and the intensity of sounds
from low to high frequencies displayed
vertically so just have a listen to what
this nightingale is doing
each bird species uses specific
vocalizations and vocal behaviors to
facilitate the way that it lives in the
world so when you’re hearing birdsong
you’re hearing how that species survives
and just when you’ve got your head
around the simplicity of that
understanding a bird will come along and
do something utterly unexpected on this
occasion I’d set up my microphones near
the bow of a spotted bow bird and in
over 2 hours he done little more than
his usual rasping and hissing calls but
when I returned to retrieve my rig he
suddenly began imitating the scariest
sounds that he knew in it in an attempt
to scare me off the sounds of not one
but two birds of prey a whistling kite
and a brown Falcon
[Music]
when I encounter behaviour like this it
reminds me that birds are not simple
instinctive animals they are intelligent
creatures and that birdsong is an
expression of varying degrees of avian
intelligence now compared to the often
precise sounds that birds use mammal
vocalizations are more individual they
are reflective of character of mood
personality and emotion I love this next
recording but getting it was one of the
most intimidating exercises because it
involved getting my microphones within
30 meters of 200 of Africa’s least
predictable and most dangerous animals
however this was necessary for me to
capture the full dynamics of their
vocalizations and I wonder whether in
listening you can feel some mammal
empathy with these lazing hippos
[Music]
mammal and bird vocalizations are often
very complex and the culmination of
evolution particularly over the last few
tens of millions of years but other
sounds in the natural world chorus of
crickets on a warm evening frogs after
rain a far more ancient and hint at the
very beginnings of animal communication
so when we listen to the sounds of
nature
today we’re hearing the story of our
planet and this gives me perspective in
my listening so too does the realization
that in my lifetime we could be losing
some of these voices this is a regent
honeyeater I could tell you about the
large flocks that early settlers
encountered over a hundred years ago of
the pitifully few remaining wild birds
and the conservation and research
efforts being focused on them now but
what I’d like to do is let you hear why
losing a species such as this would be a
great tragedy here is the beautiful
living spirit of the region honey
when we hear individual creatures we can
hear their consciousness in the world
but when we listen more inclusively to
all the sounds of nature around us we
can hear dynamics and interaction we can
hear relationships we can hear processes
in the ecosystem we can hear how nature
actually works and this first became
apparent to me in the experience of a
bird wave now a bird wave is a mixed
species feeding flock that moves through
the forest as a group and in tropical
regions they can be a breathtaking
experience involving perhaps dozens of
species and hundreds of individual birds
so imagine yourself in a rain forest
such as this one in Sulawesi Indonesia
everything is still everything is quiet
and then you notice a single bird fly in
it begins calling and then another one
and another and another a few minutes
later the forest is full of birdsong
there are birds everywhere there is
movement everywhere there hopping along
branches and through the undergrowth
every leaf seems to have a bird hanging
off it
in India ornithologists have told me
they’ve observed that first bird that
flies in is often a racket-tail trongo
it is an extraordinary mimic and they
suspect that like the Pied Piper it
draws the rest of the flock through the
forest with it while the integrity of
the flock is maintained by all those
individual contact calls so in a bird
wave we can hear the inner workings of a
complex dynamic cooperative behavior
involving many many species but for me
personally the more profound
understanding about how nature functions
has come from listening to something far
less exotic far more familiar it’s the
dawn chorus I don’t know how many dawn
choruses I’ve listened to and recorded
over the years but I’ve come to hear
them as a nuanced negotiation conducted
primarily between individuals of the
same species to define their territories
and their breeding relationships so when
a bird establishes a new territory it
will often adopt the local dialect to
signal that it now belongs and then it
will alternate that song backwards and
forwards with its neighbors and here are
a pair of white fronted honey it is
doing just that they are recognizing and
acknowledging each other
so across the avian world birds use song
and sound to negotiate their
relationships rather than actually
physically compete rather than
physically fight this is a supreme
adaptation so negotiated relationships
cooperative behaviors intelligence
together I’ve come to appreciate these
as indicating a deeper principle that
natural systems thrive not by engagement
with competition as we often understand
but a quite different process that
minimizes and avoids a lot of the
detrimental effects of competition and
the reason is simple in life vying over
resources is costly it’s risky it
expends energy it induces stress it’s a
distraction and it may only lead to
short-term benefits so a species that
competes is disadvantaged relative to a
species that is adapted to not having to
overtime over evolutionary time life
differentiates into species ever more
refined in their own ecological niche
their own way of being in the world the
outcome of this process is biodiversity
which I think of as nature’s spectacular
success at finding ways of minimizing
the damage of competition so bringing
this back to sound that sound is so
fundamental to biodiversity and species
identity leads to an interesting idea
that changes in
repertoire and vocal behavior can be
indicative of the emergence of new
species and we have a wonderful example
of that in a local songbird and see what
you recognize it’s a golden Whistler
they’re found widely throughout eastern
and southern Australian with races
throughout the Western Pacific Islands
so when I visited the Solomon Islands
recently I was curious to hear one and I
spoke to my local guide he said I will
take you to hear one tomorrow morning
actually they are my favorite songbird I
thought well that makes sense I mean
they have a very pleasant song so the
next morning we rose early and we set
off in the early hours through in the
dark along this winding narrow track
through dense tropical jungle and after
over an hour of trekking we stopped and
I set up my equipment to await the dawn
chorus it didn’t happen
what did happen was the golden Whistler
it was the loudest songbird I have ever
encountered it was close to overloading
my microphones I had to turn down the
input gain on my recorder it was
distorting my eardrums and once it began
seen its Sun continuously for over two
and a half hours this is the Solomon
Islands golden Whistler
[Laughter]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
no doubt this birds loud song is an
adaptation to the densely vegetated
habitats in which it lives but in the
process of developing this new
repertoire it’s become a new species
ornithologists have now given
provisional species status to this bird
as the Oriole Whistler so to sum up when
we listen to individual animals in the
world we can hear their sentience and
their absolute right to share this
planet with us when we listen to all the
sounds of nature together we can hear
that life is shaped more by
relationships of compatibility and
mutual benefit than competition and that
sound has shaped life itself sound that
mysterious invisible ephemeral
phenomenon is the dark matter of
evolution so I invite you to listen more
deeply to nature to spend more time in
wild places that wild other better and
when you’re there to pause and be still
and to listen to life around you perhaps
like myself and others you’d like to
make your own sound recordings but
whatever you do I hope you listen with
an open heart and a curious mind because
your personal relationship with nature
and your place within the
interconnectedness of all of life is
audible
[Applause]
[Music]
when we listen to each other we do so to
understand and share our feelings and
it’s similar with nature the sounds of
nature are reaching information and when
we listen we can find a personal
connection with with life around us so
today I would like to invite you to
listen more deeply to nature and I’m
going to share a little of what I’ve
come to understand by doing so and I’ll
begin with bird song because birds are
acoustic creatures and they create the
most extraordinary variety of sounds
they do so with their unique vocal organ
called the syrinx and when you consider
just how significant bird song is to
them you can appreciate that the
evolution of the syrinx is important for
them as the development of feathers and
flight itself this is the European
nightingale famed for its song I’ve got
to admit when I first encountered them I
was a little disappointed I thought they
sounded a bit twittery however as I
listened more deeply I could hear that
he was a bird that poured out its spirit
in song of such richness and diversity
and variety and dare I say it creativity
now in playing this to you I’d like to
introduce spectrograms a spectrogram is
a visual representation of what your
hearings with time progressing
horizontally and the intensity of sounds
from low to high frequencies displayed
vertically so just have a listen to what
this nightingale is doing
each bird species uses specific
vocalizations and vocal behaviors to
facilitate the way that it lives in the
world so when you’re hearing birdsong
you’re hearing how that species survives
and just when you’ve got your head
around the simplicity of that
understanding a bird will come along and
do something utterly unexpected on this
occasion I’d set up my microphones near
the bow of a spotted bow bird and in
over 2 hours he done little more than
his usual rasping and hissing calls but
when I returned to retrieve my rig he
suddenly began imitating the scariest
sounds that he knew in it in an attempt
to scare me off the sounds of not one
but two birds of prey a whistling kite
and a brown Falcon
[Music]
when I encounter behaviour like this it
reminds me that birds are not simple
instinctive animals they are intelligent
creatures and that birdsong is an
expression of varying degrees of avian
intelligence now compared to the often
precise sounds that birds use mammal
vocalizations are more individual they
are reflective of character of mood
personality and emotion I love this next
recording but getting it was one of the
most intimidating exercises because it
involved getting my microphones within
30 meters of 200 of Africa’s least
predictable and most dangerous animals
however this was necessary for me to
capture the full dynamics of their
vocalizations and I wonder whether in
listening you can feel some mammal
empathy with these lazing hippos
[Music]
mammal and bird vocalizations are often
very complex and the culmination of
evolution particularly over the last few
tens of millions of years but other
sounds in the natural world chorus of
crickets on a warm evening frogs after
rain a far more ancient and hint at the
very beginnings of animal communication
so when we listen to the sounds of
nature
today we’re hearing the story of our
planet and this gives me perspective in
my listening so too does the realization
that in my lifetime we could be losing
some of these voices this is a regent
honeyeater I could tell you about the
large flocks that early settlers
encountered over a hundred years ago of
the pitifully few remaining wild birds
and the conservation and research
efforts being focused on them now but
what I’d like to do is let you hear why
losing a species such as this would be a
great tragedy here is the beautiful
living spirit of the region honey
when we hear individual creatures we can
hear their consciousness in the world
but when we listen more inclusively to
all the sounds of nature around us we
can hear dynamics and interaction we can
hear relationships we can hear processes
in the ecosystem we can hear how nature
actually works and this first became
apparent to me in the experience of a
bird wave now a bird wave is a mixed
species feeding flock that moves through
the forest as a group and in tropical
regions they can be a breathtaking
experience involving perhaps dozens of
species and hundreds of individual birds
so imagine yourself in a rain forest
such as this one in Sulawesi Indonesia
everything is still everything is quiet
and then you notice a single bird fly in
it begins calling and then another one
and another and another a few minutes
later the forest is full of birdsong
there are birds everywhere there is
movement everywhere there hopping along
branches and through the undergrowth
every leaf seems to have a bird hanging
off it
in India ornithologists have told me
they’ve observed that first bird that
flies in is often a racket-tail trongo
it is an extraordinary mimic and they
suspect that like the Pied Piper it
draws the rest of the flock through the
forest with it while the integrity of
the flock is maintained by all those
individual contact calls so in a bird
wave we can hear the inner workings of a
complex dynamic cooperative behavior
involving many many species but for me
personally the more profound
understanding about how nature functions
has come from listening to something far
less exotic far more familiar it’s the
dawn chorus I don’t know how many dawn
choruses I’ve listened to and recorded
over the years but I’ve come to hear
them as a nuanced negotiation conducted
primarily between individuals of the
same species to define their territories
and their breeding relationships so when
a bird establishes a new territory it
will often adopt the local dialect to
signal that it now belongs and then it
will alternate that song backwards and
forwards with its neighbors and here are
a pair of white fronted honey it is
doing just that they are recognizing and
acknowledging each other
so across the avian world birds use song
and sound to negotiate their
relationships rather than actually
physically compete rather than
physically fight this is a supreme
adaptation so negotiated relationships
cooperative behaviors intelligence
together I’ve come to appreciate these
as indicating a deeper principle that
natural systems thrive not by engagement
with competition as we often understand
but a quite different process that
minimizes and avoids a lot of the
detrimental effects of competition and
the reason is simple in life vying over
resources is costly it’s risky it
expends energy it induces stress it’s a
distraction and it may only lead to
short-term benefits so a species that
competes is disadvantaged relative to a
species that is adapted to not having to
overtime over evolutionary time life
differentiates into species ever more
refined in their own ecological niche
their own way of being in the world the
outcome of this process is biodiversity
which I think of as nature’s spectacular
success at finding ways of minimizing
the damage of competition so bringing
this back to sound that sound is so
fundamental to biodiversity and species
identity leads to an interesting idea
that changes in
repertoire and vocal behavior can be
indicative of the emergence of new
species and we have a wonderful example
of that in a local songbird and see what
you recognize it’s a golden Whistler
they’re found widely throughout eastern
and southern Australian with races
throughout the Western Pacific Islands
so when I visited the Solomon Islands
recently I was curious to hear one and I
spoke to my local guide he said I will
take you to hear one tomorrow morning
actually they are my favorite songbird I
thought well that makes sense I mean
they have a very pleasant song so the
next morning we rose early and we set
off in the early hours through in the
dark along this winding narrow track
through dense tropical jungle and after
over an hour of trekking we stopped and
I set up my equipment to await the dawn
chorus it didn’t happen
what did happen was the golden Whistler
it was the loudest songbird I have ever
encountered it was close to overloading
my microphones I had to turn down the
input gain on my recorder it was
distorting my eardrums and once it began
seen its Sun continuously for over two
and a half hours this is the Solomon
Islands golden Whistler
[Laughter]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
no doubt this birds loud song is an
adaptation to the densely vegetated
habitats in which it lives but in the
process of developing this new
repertoire it’s become a new species
ornithologists have now given
provisional species status to this bird
as the Oriole Whistler so to sum up when
we listen to individual animals in the
world we can hear their sentience and
their absolute right to share this
planet with us when we listen to all the
sounds of nature together we can hear
that life is shaped more by
relationships of compatibility and
mutual benefit than competition and that
sound has shaped life itself sound that
mysterious invisible ephemeral
phenomenon is the dark matter of
evolution so I invite you to listen more
deeply to nature to spend more time in
wild places that wild other better and
when you’re there to pause and be still
and to listen to life around you perhaps
like myself and others you’d like to
make your own sound recordings but
whatever you do I hope you listen with
an open heart and a curious mind because
your personal relationship with nature
and your place within the
interconnectedness of all of life is
audible
[Applause]
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