Bioacoustic revelry – David George Haskell: Recent Episodes
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The forest is full of strange and expected voices these days… Here’s one, from a week or so ago. It was a dry day, following two months of record-breaking dry days. The sun was barely down. From the edge of a suburban woodlot, ear-sparkles came from the treetops, like the fizz and pop of a […]
From the dawn-light series (see also silk and moth wings)… There is a moment in the early morning when the sun catpaws through the forest’s tangled blankets, illuminating my hummingbird feeder. The touch is gentle. The claws of midday are withheld. For two or three minutes, sun fires the blur of wings. For the rest […]
I recorded the Sewanee annual firework display at a lookout spot across a mountain cove from the detonations. Before the pyrotechnics, the katydids made my ears ring, but the explosions out-shouted even the combined acoustic power of tens of thousands of singing insects. Here is the finale of the show: (email subscribers, here is a […]
Last week brought seemingly never-ending rainstorms to Sewanee. The downstream effects were dramatic. Crow Creek, running from the entrance to Buggytop Cave, south of Sewanee, was overtopping huge boulders and engulfing trees. The water here comes from the sinkhole in Lost Cove and from the many streams that run from the south side of Sewanee. […]
This: …before being released from the bucket in which I transported the snake from a friend’s house. One cannot age a rattlesnake by simply counting the rattles (they gain a rattle with each molt, but usually molt more than once per year). However, this one was a youngster, maybe two years old? My post from […]
When the temperature dropped below forty degrees, the frogs shut up. A few hours later, we hit the twenties, the pond was ice and the rocks from which the frogs had called were snow-covered. The only sound was the creak of a Virginia pine’s knotty entrails, twisted by the weight of ice on its needles […]
Rain + warmth = Pseudacris crucifer. The spring peeper. Spring? Seriously? Appearing for one night only at a backyard pond in Tennessee. Tomorrow: the freeze returns. They are calling at an ear-ringing 85+ decibels. These frogs are so loud that birds have to adjust their songs near chorusing peepers. So crank this one to 11: […]
About fifteen years ago, the local electrical company hired a crew of subcontractors to cut and trim any trees that were deemed a threat to powerlines. The crew gave the sugar maple in our front garden a lop-sided haircut, slicing away all the branches on the south side. Regrettably, the equipment they used must have […]
Tens of thousands of cranes gather at Hiwassee. Gruuu gruuu: sound resonates within the trachea coiled within their sternum. Horn section of the avian band. An ancient sound; Sandhill Cranes have flown across North America for at least ten million years. In this recording, made on my phone, you’ll hear the cranes overhead, and the […]
These oysters were harvested in the Seto Sea off the coast of Hiroshima. This sea has thousands of bamboo rafts floating on its surface, each raft home to huge colonies of oysters dangling from ropes in the water below. The region produces tens of thousands of tons of oysters every year, a large portion of […]