I have become a connoisseur of sound. Nature sounds to be precise. I'm a visual person, enamored of images and deeply enjoying opportunties to practice nature photography. But in the process of completing the volunteer hours required for my Master Naturalist certification, I have been working with the county forest preserve district doing frog call surveys. These are done after sunset and I find myself spending hours alone after dark in the county forest preserves. There's not a lot to see (though when the moon is nearly full there is a beauty unique to its pale light) but there is plenty to listen to-- sometimes a rich tapestry of sound; sometimes vast stillness with only brief interruptions of sound; sometimes subtle sounds emanating from the darkness. There's the crescendoing chorus of spring peepers or cricket frogs building in intensity and volume only to taper off again for an interlude of silence before starting all over. There's the sharp slap of a beaver's tale on the water warning of my intrusion into their world of night. There's the nearby chattering of two raccoons apparently in some disagreement, the distant hooting of a great horned owl, the snorting and stamping of a herd of deer in the meadow as startling to me as I am to them. As the weather gets warmer the insects increasingly become a part of the symphony of night. They're only getting started now with the whirring of some nearby crickets, the fluttering of a moth when my flashlight is on, the buzzing of a mosquito.
At a time I'm normally home sleeping, there's an awful lot going on in the woods and on the water. Some of the sound is incidental -- the startled deer, the angry raccoons and the buzzing mosquito (indeed, it would be to the mosquito's advantage to approach me more silently!), but much of it is purposeful, in particular, the calling of the frogs. Using sound to attract a mate makes a lot of sense when the attracting is to be done at night (some species will call in the daylight hours as well as after dark, spring peepers and cricket frogs among them, but after sunset is definitely prime time). I marvel at the diversity of the frog and toad calls-- a much greater variety than the stereotyped cartoon-style "ribbit". And I am impressed by how well and how far most of the calls carry, over the water especially, but also across land. In my surveys I have frequently discovered temporary bodies of water I didn't know existed by following the calls of one or more frogs or toads. It's a system of finding a mate beautifully designed for life after dark at the water's edge and just one more small detail attesting to the brilliance and creativity of the Master Designer. "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!" (Psalm 150:6) Amen I say to that.
My experiences in the woods at night have given me a whole new appreciation for the richness of our audio environment. Please enjoy this sampling of "sound bites" from my wandering in the woods (or hop over to my Frog Blog and Podcast).
Sample Sound Bites:
- the rise and fall of a chorus of spring peepers
- a couple of western chorus frogs
- intro by crickets, feautred solo by eastern gray tree frog, percussion by cricket frogs, incidental sounds by geese on the lake, a bird in the woods and distant American toads
