I was cleaning up my archive of nature sound recordings and ran across a lovely pre-dawn recording from the mountains north of Mimbres, New Mexico. In this rather remote area between two large wilderness areas was a small USFS campground where I stayed for a couple of nights back in June of 2015. It was a great trip, with perfect weather. Robins, Steller’s jays, chickadees, juncos, and warblers were singing. Wild turkeys skulked through the brush and a fresh line of bear tracks led us down a hiking trail. With the evening came a rich variety of birds that highlighted this nexus of habitats between the Rockies and Sierra Madre Occidental – Mexican spotted owls and Mexican whippoorwills calling along with Common nighthawks and Common poorwills, Great horned owls and Western screech-owls. As dawn approached, Hermit thrushes and Cordilleran flycatchers joined the Red-faced warblers and Elegant trogon. Here is a snippet of this lovely pre-dawn, before the chaos of the dawn chorus was in full swing:
A huge wildfire swept through the area in 2022. The road up the canyon appears to be the western line for the fire, which means the campground might be ok, but everything to the east, most of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, burned. I haven’t been able to find detailed fire intensity maps, and currently the area is closed due to concern about flash floods. It’s hard not to be sad about the habitat lost, not to mention the wildlife caught in the flames.
This is an area well adapted to fire and it will recover with time. Droughts and more frequent fires, products of climate change, may change what the recovery will look like and fast it will be. But it will recover. I can’t help but wonder, though, if this suite of species, this mix of northern and southern species, will ever sing together in this place again.
I recently read a book by Kathleen Dean Moore entitled, “Earth’s wild music,” about our changing sonic environment and what it means. The book is a collection of essays, beautifully written, of some of her experiences in the natural world and the sounds that filled her heart. One set of essays describes a trip to Mount St. Helens, 40 years after the eruption of 1980. She expected to find little but ash and dead trees and silence. Instead, she found life:
“What had been silent is noisy with chatter and song. I was not ready for this. It unnerved me to be confused about the difference between destruction and creation. Destruction, creation, catastrophe, renewal, sorrow, and joy are merely human ways of seeing, human projections onto the landscape, the ecologist insisted. What is real, he said, is change. What is necessary, he said, is change. Suddenly, there are new niches, new places to grow and flourish. In ponds, landslides, rocky hillsides, and a great profusion of edges, beetles troop over stumps, huckleberries emerge from snow banks, astonished pocket gophers dig into the sun. Between the forest patches, meadows fill with the creatures of wet prairies and oak savannahs…
‘Refugia,’ they call them: places of safety where life endures. From the refugia, mice and toads emerged onto the blasted plain. Grasses spread, strawberries sent out runners. From a thousand, ten thousand, maybe countless small places of enduring life, forests and meadows returned to the mountain.”
Another essay describes a trip to a lake in Oregon that had been the location of many family outings over the years and had become a source of solace. This special place burned in a wildfire, and she visited while tree stumps were still smoking.
“I had loved the sound of Davis Lake in the spring. I remember waking early one morning years ago, in my sleeping bag under pines at the edge of the lake. As Frank and our little ones breathed quietly beside me, great blue herons flapped over the marshland, croaking. Red-breasted nuthatches called from the pines. Coots splashed in circles, and sandhill cranes clattered on the far side of the lake, leaping and flapping their wings in a clumsy dance. I remember how the frogs shouted that morning, filling the air like a cheering crowd. In a pine far down the lake, fledgling eaglets begged without ceasing, a scraping sound like pebbles against steel. I had settled in my sleeping bag, warm and grateful.
But now the music is gone, and the silence is so complete that I brush my ears to be sure I can still hear. Finally a raven calls. A single grasshopper scratches in the black stubble. The wind lifts slender whirlwinds from the ashes. But without pine needles to make music of the wind, even the whirlwinds are silent. I stand with my head back and my eyes closed, trying to understand how it could be so suddenly gone, the green singing life of this place.”
But as she stumbled through the ashes, near a spring she saw new blades of grass emerging and coiled leaves of willows unfurling.
“But in this greening place of ashes and springs, I begin to understand that time cannot move in a circle, coming again to where it was before. Time sweeps in a spiral, going round and round again—the cycles of the seasons, the flow of the cold springs, the growth of a forest or a child—but never returns to the same place.”
It is difficult, so difficult, to accept that not all of the world progresses at the same speed as a human lifetime. We cannot hold the world still even if we wanted to. Pond turns to meadow turns to forest. Forest fire. Flood. Start all over.
Could I ever go back to that campground between the Gila and Aldo Leopold Wildernesses and capture the same soundscape, that same juxtaposition of species singing in a June pre-dawn? Probably not. But as life returns to the forest, even if it looks more like a meadow than a forest, some wild voices will return. The dynamic nature of change in soundscapes is what drives me now, to capture the fleeting voices. Wildlife is disappearing at an alarming rate, mostly due to habitat loss, as ever-increasing human populations crowd them off the planet. And every day, wild voices are going silent.
