Laura Erickson's For the Birds

On Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, I got up at 3:30 in the morning to do my annual Mourning Dove Survey for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Every year I start counting precisely at 4:55 in Adolph Township. It’s far enough away from Duluth that I originally expected that it would be pretty quiet except for birds and frogs.

My first stop is within hearing distance of Highway 2, and even at that early hour on a weekend there’s fairly steady truck traffic. Railroad tracks run nearby, and though they’re at least a mile away for the first half of my 20 stops, much of the time I can hear the distant hum of a train, and often a long, slow train whistle. Normally I love train sounds—they seem so romantic and evocative—but they’re so close to the frequency of Mourning Dove calls that they make listening frustrating. I don’t like truck sounds anytime, so those bother me a lot more. But even worse, at my first stop there’s an enormous power line about ¼ mile away that makes a loud, constant hum. I’m unusually conscious of sounds and noises, but I honestly can’t imagine that anyone living near it isn’t irritated by that noise when outside or when windows are open. I can still easily hear the hum at my second stop, precisely a mile from the first, about one and a quarter miles from the power line. No wonder people in Wisconsin are upset about a large corporation using eminent domain to build such a noisy thing on their private property.

Greg Budney, curator of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Library of Natural Sounds, told me that to get recordings that don’t have any car or truck sounds at all, you need to be about five miles from highways. That seemed exaggerated to me, but when I use my parabolic microphone, I can readily discern that it’s true. My directional microphone doesn’t amplify sounds the way my parabola does, so the directional mic is more forgiving of distant sounds, but because it doesn’t pinpoint sounds with the same accuracy as the parabola, the nearby background noises are relatively louder.

The more time I spend trying to get good, clean recordings of birds, the more I notice what a noisy world we humans have fashioned for ourselves and everyone else within earshot. I’m writing this program at my computer, and as I sit here can hear the computer and the monitor both humming, a clock ticking, an electrical light buzzing, a few cars from down on Superior Street, which is five blocks away, a more distant siren, and the television set downstairs. Genuine silence is a rare gift nowadays, most often enjoyed during a gentle snowfall in a wilderness area.

Of course, the sounds I do enjoy hearing are precisely the ones that drive other people bonkers. Last week a woman called who’s been having trouble sleeping because a Whip-poor-will outside her window simply will not shut up all night long. She likes birds–this one just happens to interfere with sleep. Maybe I’d feel that way if I had no choice but to listen to a Whip-poor-will night after night after night, but I sort of doubt it. The one night I did have a Whip-poor-will in my own yard, I found it pleasant and soothing, and was intrigued with the rate of its calling. I felt sad when I awoke in the morning to realize I’d fallen asleep and lost count.