Birdsong Entrances Human Senses

A few minutes of listening can reveal the outlines of a bird community. Birdsong also entrances human senses, and many naturalists have spent years learning and appreciating their sounds. Finding skilled birders is easier than finding qualified nematode, fungus, plant, or insect taxonomists. Birds also stimulate human concern more than many other animals. Compared with studies of less charismatic creatures, studies of birds yield information more immediately appealing to human aesthetics and ethics. Song, evolved to mediate social interactions within species, is now a conduit for humans to listen across species boundaries. Clearing the land for a pine plantation is a brutal assault. First, every tree is cut. Much of the forest is stacked in piles the size of churches and burned. Any remaining saplings and understory are then bulldozed. Trucks or helicopters finish the job of suppression with herbicide. Without poison, many of the forest plants would resprout.

Everything Has A Price To Pay

Millennia of fires and windstorms have taught the vegetation to rebound. But the plantation demands not resilience from the former forest, but near annihilation. Rivulets and forest wetlands were often bulldozed along with the forest. Downstream, what were clear mountain streams ran like chocolate milk, so opaque that I could not see my skin through the water in my cupped hands. Clearing complete, immigrant laborers, mostly teenagers and young men, plant rows of pine saplings from nurseries. The pay, according to a 2003 study in Alabama, is between $0.015 and $0.06 per tree. A fast planter can make $80 a day, ten times the rate of pay for agricultural work in Mexico. The work is hard and the pace unrelenting. In the words of one planting contractor from Alabama, We have offered up to $9/hour without a single American worker lasting more than 3 days. It’s not a good job.

Things Happen That Way

Without the migrant workers, agriculture and forestry would die in this country. The newsprint and toilet papers that come from these plantations exact a heavy toll on both the land and human bodies. They also contribute little to local economies. Local government officials complained that logging trucks do not even buy their fuel in the counties where the plantations grow. Short of a layer of asphalt, it is hard to imagine a more thorough transformation of the forest. The change is evident to any resident or visitor. But human testimony from these lands is rare. The timber company owns tens of thousands of acres. There are no settlements on the land, few public roads into the heart of these operations, and the surrounding rural counties are sparsely populated. Stories of the forest seldom leave these places. Scientific measurement can be a missive from an otherwise unheard landscape. Science is not only a process of study and discovery, it is also a way to bear witness, albeit via human ears listening to a tiny portion of the forest community’s many inhabitants.

Remember To Forget

In the indigenous oak forests of the region, I heard, on average, six bird species at each survey point. As I moved from point to point, the species changed, revealing variations in habitat. Some were very common. But overall, the bird community had an even mix of species, a community with many voices, not dominated by a small number of species. In older pine plantations, this diverse weave of sound was thinned to frayed muslin. Each survey point averaged four species. Across all survey points, I found twenty species. Younger plantations, those whose trees were just a few years old and grew ankle to shoulder high, were similarly simplified, but inhabited by birds that prefer thickets and forest edges, like indigo buntings and field sparrows. My surveys showed not only that plantations were depauperate places for bird diversity, but also that the rest of the rural landscape was, contrary to the claims of the plantation apologists, home to rich communities of birds. Both rural residential areas and forests that had been logged but then left to regenerate without herbicides or bulldozing had bird diversity as high as or higher than that of mature oak forests. These lands retain large patches of forest, and thus many bird species, but also include brushy areas and fields that attract sparrows, buntings, wrens, and others. From the front porch of houses in these wooded areas, you can hear ten or more species singing at any one time. In all, rural settlements were home to more than sixty species in my surveys. My surveys were possible only because of birdsong. At least 90 percent of the birds I detected I heard but did not see. In all, I noted 4,700 individual birds across the five hundred survey points. Fed into graphs and statistical analyses, my experience of the presence of these animals was given legitimacy by the language of science and thus communicative power within human institutions. In the end, my surveys, and the extensive work of habitat mapping and analysis by a dozen colleagues, persuaded a national conservation group to successfully pressure timber corporations to stop converting native forests to plantations and to work with the state to set up conservation lands. To this day, local economies receive little economic benefit from these forests and plantations. Such graphs and statistics help us to understand and communicate. But they also serve as a substitute for lived experience by decision makers. There were no representatives of local communities present. In the absence of the scent of trees, the varied songs of birds, the sight of running water, and the feel of soil and tree roots in fingers, a handful of graphs had to suffice. The sustained direct sensory experience that is the root of human aesthetics, understanding, and ethics has almost no place in our corporate structures. For large businesses and nonprofits, and for many parts of government, listening is present only in highly mediated forms. This method of growing and harvesting wood pulp directly suppresses sonic diversity. And so it is across much of Earth. Worldwide, human needs and desires are curtailing and extinguishing the voices of other species. We live in a time of rapid diminishment of sonic diversity, both in the direct extinction of other species and through the shrinkage of habitat.