Soundscapes are constantly changing, from moment to moment, season to season. In the temperate zones, winters are much quieter than summers, as many of the birds have disappeared to their wintering areas and the insects have stopped singing. The leaves of the deciduous trees have fallen off, quieting the ever-present rustling that we don’t even notice most of the time.
This quieter environment gives us a chance to listen to the more delicate sounds of winter: the whisper of falling snow, the quick tapping of tree branches quivering in a cold breeze, the soft calls of small birds as they wander through the forest searching for sustenance, the gurgles and giggles of a winter stream. Of course, not all winter sounds are quiet: ice booms, avalanches thunder, and high winds can make trees roar and crack. As the temperatures warm, the snow melts and rivers rise. William deBuys beautifully describes a snowmelt-swollen river in The Walk:
In the last weeks the weather has warmed and the river has swollen with snowmelt, enough so that water now streams over the top of the boulder I am looking at, and a tiny recirculating wave keeps forming in the mini-rapid in its lee. But the wave cannot hold. It quivers an inch upstream, then quivers an inch down. It shudders and vanishes, then reappears and quivers some more. It is the apotheosis of instability, trembling with constant change. This tiny drama, repeated at every boulder, stone, and log in the river, becomes in the aggregate a river-long throbbing that is infinite in the variety of its expression and the continuity of its permanence. Or may I should not call it a throbbing but a vibration, or not a vibration but a grumbling, because it is audible. Or not a grumbling but a kind of deep-throated laughter. The marvel is that this sound, whether whispered or shouted, has voiced itself continuously in this canyon for tens of thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands. The river has never ceased to speak.
deBuys was writing of the Rio de las Trampas in New Mexico, but he could have been writing about any river. Each river, stream, creek, or rivulet has its own voice, each voice changing constantly from day to day, season to season. The Carson River in northern Nevada is one of my favorite rivers. I’ve written of it before (Lazy morning on the Carson River, The dead-end river), not only describing its varied sounds, but its importance as a biological corridor.
I visited the river again this past December and early January. When I first arrived, the river was frozen and the banks covered with snow from a snowfall in early December. But that was to be the last snowfall for awhile, as the western US got locked into a strong high-pressure system that brought relatively warm and dry conditions, while the eastern half of the US was getting tons of snow and frigid weather. The magpies and Canada geese that are normally found along the river were scarce, as were most of the other birds that spend the winter. But in the unfrozen sections of the river, it continued to sing its lovely winter-song, its syrupy waters gliding and gurgling among the rocks and boulders. Listen carefully to the following recording. It’s just water. Simply water, but deep in its delicate complexity. Best with headphones.
Quote from deBuys, W. 2007. The walk. Trinity University Press, San Antonio.
Recording notes: Recorded with Sony PCM-M10 and Audio-Technica AT2022 mic with Felmicamps SK3.5 pre-amp.