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I’m Losing My Hearing, Part 3: Life is Good
In Parts 1 and 2 of this three-part post, we looked at Allard’s ground crickets, Cedar Waxwings, and Brown Creepers. Actually, we listened to them. To the extent that we looked at them, we did so spectrographically: We “saw” their songs and calls in the form of sound spectrograms—computer readouts of various aspects, or parameters, of the animals’ vocalizations.
No question about it, these three species are most readily detected by their vocalizations. I would guess that 90% of my Cedar Waxwing detections are by voice. For Brown Creepers, I’d say 95%. And for Allard’s ground crickets, at least 99%. Probably more like 99.9%. Where I live, these ground crickets are abundant and ubiquitous. They’re small and drab, they hide in tall grass, and they sing constantly.
It hasn’t always been that way. There was a time when I didn’t yet
know the songs and calls of crickets, creepers, and waxwings.
I well remember my first Cedar Waxwing and my first Brown
Creeper. The waxwings—a small flock in an eastern red cedar—were on February 12, 1982. The creeper, less than 24 hours later on February 13, was in a pitch pine. I remember them because of their exquisite, impossible beauty—the waxwing strikingly so; the creeper subtly, but just as compellingly, so. Their feathers were perfect. The meme wasn’t out there yet, but, if it had been, I would have declared:
Life is good.
If the waxwings and creeper vocalized, I have no memory of it.
Fast forward to October 2, 2014. I can tell you the exact time: 7:57 pm Mountain Daylight Time. That’s when I first recorded an Allard’s ground cricket. I recall the episode with the same clarity that I remember my first waxwing and creeper, long, long ago. Of course, 7:57 pm on Oct. 2 of last year wasn’t the first time I’d ever heard an Allard’s ground cricket. I’d become generally aware of them in the couple weeks leading up that point. And I must have heard literally thousands of them, but without knowing it, in previous years.
Same with waxwings and creepers, don’t you think? I grew up in in a part of the country where Cedar Waxwings and Brown Creepers are of routine occurrence. I must have heard scores, probably hundreds, of them prior to that pair of definitive sightings on Presidents’ Day weekend (did they even call it that back then?) in 1982.
It’s not enough, practically any birder will tell you, simply to “get the bird.” Every kid in the neighborhood of my childhood must, in some objective sense, have “gotten” Cedar Waxwing and Brown Creeper. And if even I, with my deficient hearing, can still hear Allard’s ground crickets, then surely every preteen in my current neighborhood has, in that same sense, “gotten” Allard’s ground cricket.
Which is ridiculous.
Appreciating a bird (or an insect) requires more than seeing and hearing. Nature study in general and birding in particular require awareness, sensitivity, and understanding. Suppose I get to the point at which I can’t hear Allard’s ground crickets at all; suppose my hearing deteriorates to the point that I can’t even hear creepers and waxwings. Does that mean I can’t enjoy them anymore?
My fondest memory of Brown Creepers is from April of 1983. The creeper flight that spring was exceptionally strong. Creepers were everywhere, and I noticed how some of them would land on the proverbial “broad side of the barn”—actually the large wooden exterior of a big nature center at a park near my house. They would always creep from the lower right to the upper left, and they would do so at what I estimated to be a 60° angle. That observation, in turn, got me to thinking about calculating the number of rotations required for a creeper to get up a tree of known height and diameter. (I wish I’d a written it up: “Introducing Biotopology: Rotation, Chirality, and Certhia americana–Implications for Two-dimensional Manifolds.”) It’s belaboring the obvious, but my enjoyment of those Brown Creepers was visual and even mathematical, not aural.
Left: This Cedar Waxwing, lacking the waxy red tips to the secondaries, is an “SY” (second-year) bird. Chaffee County, Colorado; June 6, 2015. Right: This “ASY” (after-second-year) Cedar Waxwing has two generations of secondaries (S1-S2 are this year’s, S5-S6 are last year’s, and S3-S4 are missing). Boulder County, Colorado; Nov. 1, 2015.
Much more recently, I’ve been enjoying Cedar Waxwings with a technology that didn’t exist in 1983: digital photography. So often with my digital camera it’s “Shoot first, Ask questions later.” I’ve heard people disparage this approach, and I don’t understand why. On digital photographs of waxwings and other birds, I can see—and learn about—details of feather molt that I simply cannot discern in the field. And if I have a question about what I’m seeing in one of my photos, I email molt guru Peter Pyle for help. (Same goes for insects. Scott, Dennis, Alison, Nancy, Beel, Giff, Wil, Ben, Denise, and especially Eric: Thanks for fielding all my inquiries.)
My newfound appreciation of orthopteran sounds, like my ongoing interest in molt, has been brought about in no small way by the digital revolution. I document insect song with equipment that wasn’t invented until recently, I analyze the data with freeware that wasn’t available until recently, and I post my recordings to websites that didn’t exist until recently.
I’m probably at the point now where I’m starting to hear some distortion in the songs of the highest-pitched birds and insects. That doesn’t bother me. All of human perception, when you think about it, is just that: perception. Reality is out there, beyond our grasp. Even the best eyes, ears, and brains can’t process it all; digital photography, sound spectrograms, and computer programs undeniably contribute to our appreciation of the natural world.
I don’t see, hear, and smell the natural world as well as I used to. But my appreciation for natural things is undiminished. Check that: My appreciation of natural things is enhanced, with each new product release and download.
Birders know to keep a good field notebook. Shown here is perhaps the most important field notebook entry of all time: Galileo’s observations of the moons of Jupiter.
Before I was interested in insects, even before I was a birder, I was an astronomer. In grade school I had a starter telescope, adequate for studying the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn—and not much else. Honestly, you don’t even need a scope to see those objects; a decent pair of binoculars will suffice. You do need some amount of assistance, though. Even the best of human eyes—think of the sharpest teen birder in your state or province—cannot resolve those objects. But my middle age eyes, aided by simple binoculars, are more than adequate.
If I had to choose the single most exhilarating moment in all of human history, I think it would be the night of January 7, 1610. That’s when Galileo Galilei, a month shy of his 46th birthday, pointed a crude telescope at Jupiter and saw its moons. For millennia, everybody had known about Jupiter. It shines brighter than the brightest star in the sky. But nobody had ever seen—nobody even knew about—the moons of Jupiter.
I still get goose bumps, every time I lay eyes on the moons of Jupiter. That’s not quite right. I ought to say: Every time I raise my binoculars to the moons of Jupiter; my human eyes alone aren’t good enough. In the same way, I find deep satisfaction in digital photographs of waxwings, sound spectrograms of crickets, and mathematical musings about the meanderings of creepers. Don’t get me wrong: There is satisfaction of a different sort in simply seeing waxwings, hearing crickets, and smiling at the industriousness of a Brown Creeper. It is awesome, in the grand old sense of the word, just to behold the night sky. But those feelings of satisfaction, and even awe, are only the beginning. They lead, inevitably and inexorably, to further discovery and wonder, aided and abetted by technology.
Life is good.
Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2015/11/im-losing-my-hearing-part-3-life-is-good.html
