timeThe story begins 30 years ago, when Bernie Krause made his first audio clip at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, a 20-minute drive from his home near San Francisco. He chose a spot near an old maple tree. Many people enjoy this spot: there is a creek nearby and picnic benches scattered around.
As a soundscape engineer, Kraus has traveled around the world listening to the sounds of the earth. But by 1993, he turned his attention to what was happening on his doorstep. In his first recording, animals living in dense scrub habitats emit a series of giggles, peeps and squeaks. His sensitive microphones captured the sounds of creeks, the sounds of creatures rustling in the undergrowth, and the songs of spotted woodcocks, orange-crowned warblers, house wrens and mourning doves.
At the time, Krause never considered this a form of data collection. He started recording ecosystem sounds simply because he found them beautiful and relaxing. Krause suffers from ADHD and finds that no medication helps: the only way to relieve his anxiety, he says, is to go out and listen to music.
Inadvertently, he began to collect a wealth of data. For the next thirty years, he would return to that spot in the bigleaf maple tree every April, put down the tape recorder, and wait to hear what it would reveal.
But last April, Krause played back his recording and was greeted by something he had never heard before: complete silence. The recorder ran on its usual schedule, but there was no bird song, no sound of water flowing over stone, no beating of wings. “At the top of the spring, I had an hour’s worth of material and nothing,” Krause said. What’s happening here is just a small sign of something much larger happening almost everywhere.
A Rich sound weave fade out
Animals make a variety of sounds: to find a mate, to protect territory, to identify offspring or simply by moving. But ecologists have traditionally measured environmental health by looking at habitats rather than listening to them. Kraus advances the idea that the sounds of a healthy ecosystem consist not just of the calls of individual animals but of dense, structured weaves of sounds that he calls biological sounds.
In 2009, as Krauss listened closely to his archives, he realized a story was emerging: a subtle but noticeable loss in the density and variety of natural sounds.
At the same time, he began observing strange things happening at Sugarloaf Ridge Park. The leaves of some tree species unfold two weeks earlier than recorded in historical records. Changes in flowering times mean birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway are out of sync with food sources along the way. Winter rainfall patterns have changed. Then in 2012, unusually dry conditions began to set in. California has been experiencing scant rainfall and record-high temperatures, driving dry land to unprecedented levels.
In 2014, as Northern California experienced its worst drought in 1,200 years, the birdsong in Krause’s recording softened.
In 2015, there was silence, and there was no sound of streams or wind. In 2016, the silence was broken only by the call of the purple finch.
Krause wrote in his 2012 book “The Great Orchestra of Animals” that even as human voices grew deafening, nature fell into a vast silence. The feeling of desolation is more than just silence.
Life was swept away fire
Then, in 2017, came the Tubbs Fire, the most destructive wildfire in Northern California’s modern history.
On an October morning, Krause happened to wake up at 2.30am as the fire spread to his home. He and his wife had to walk through a wall of fire surrounding the house. He said that none of the objects we accumulated during our lives have survived except for us. A tornado of fire boiled with angry sounds as we rushed toward the car.
It’s a sound that still haunts us, he said. I rarely go through the night without being awakened by horrific nightmares of sound.
Driven by wind gusts of 78 mph, the fire burned through the entire neighborhood. Claus cats Seaweed and Barnacle are dead. He lost 70 years of letters, photos and field journals when fire destroyed the refrigerator and turned it into an unrecognizable puddle of aluminum and steel. A precious archive of his recordings survives, with copies stored elsewhere.
The Tubbs Fire burned 80% of Sugarloaf Ridge Park. Park manager John Roney managed to evacuate 50-60 campers as the fire barreled toward them.
The bigleaf maples survived. It survived fire, said retired state park archaeologist Breck Parkman. It lost its branches and was partially stunted, but it survived. But in September 2020, the Grass Fire happened: one of nearly 30 wildfires in California that month.
That nearly wiped out what was left of the tree, Parkman said. He remembers taking Clint Eastwood to see it, and some botanists trying to determine whether it was the largest maple in the American West—but they never confirmed its status. However, this is not important. The birds know the tree is great. To them, he said, it was the tree of life.
He believes the tree should live for another few hundred years and likens it to an elder who brings delicious food to family gatherings. One day, that person disappeared. It’s a sadness that’s hard to describe, he said.
This is a kind of loss, but also a kind of longing. I suspect the birds still miss that tree. I do.
Many forest ecosystems rely on fire to break down dead wood and old leaves, but historically these have tended to be smaller fires. They generally do not burn the canopy, so insects and other animals can take refuge without being scorched. Larger fires in recent years have experienced higher temperatures, threatening endangered species with limited ranges.
Desirae Harp, a state park educator and member of the local Mishevar Wapo tribe, said the silence after the fire broke her heart.
It is heartbreaking to hear the silence from all the native plants and animals that are our relatives. I feel like when humans die, we call it genocide. But when we destroy entire ecosystems, we don’t always understand the consequences.
Send a silent message to the world
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is one of the most important environmental books of the 20th century. Published in 1962, it warned that if people did not stop destroying nature, especially through the use of pesticides such as DDT, the numbers of birds and other wildlife would continue to decline and nature would begin to fall silent.
In Krause’s April 2023 record, not only were there no birdsong, but there was also no water in the creek. ‘It’s shocking that we are witnessing this in our lifetime,’ he said.
Comparison between 2003 and 2023:
In 2019, Krause argued that the climate crisis may be changing the natural acoustic structure of the Earth. He compared the natural world to a concert hall: If the heat and humidity of a concert hall change, the performer’s ability to perform changes as well.
The same thing happened with the Earth Orchestra. He wrote that new atmospheric conditions were disrupting natural sounds. Only significant mitigation actions can help protect the planet.
One of the reasons people are initially drawn to Sonoma County (home to most of the state parks) is for fishing, hunting and swimming in the creeks. Steven Lee, research manager at the Sonoma Ecology Center, said there were many places to swim in the 1970s. People don’t swim in the creek here anymore. why not? Because there is not enough water.
Biodiversity associated with rivers has also been lost. Without water, Chinook salmon and steelhead trout cannot reach their spawning grounds. Of Krause’s latest recording, Lee said it was “absolutely intense.” The pessimist in me would say that we’re probably going to see a lot of these declines continue to happen.
In arid areas such as California, waterways are important lifelines for wildlife, with the entire life chain dependent on them. Drought means this lifeline no longer flows through the land.
Caitlin Cornwall, project manager at the Sonoma Ecology Center, said there is a direct link between reversing climate change and more birds being recorded in Burnie.
She calls Sugarloaf a relatively modest example of what happens during extreme drought.
Drought is not the only stressor. Across the state, human activities are eroding animals’ food sources and habitat. Wild areas are being converted to farmland and urban areas, and invasive species are becoming increasingly common. Some of the songbirds Krause captured in 1993, such as the orange-crowned warbler, are now generally in decline.
Many of the birds captured in Krause’s records were migratory species that lived on the knife’s edge, Cornish said. If one year’s cohort dies in a particular location, the young or even adults may not return the next year. Assuming they survive elsewhere, it can take several generations to recolonize a habitat.
Kraus, who has been documenting ecosystems from Africa to Latin America to Europe, said it was disheartening to hear how the places he visited had changed. His personal library contains more than 5,000 hours of recordings collected from around the world over 55 years. He estimates that 70 percent of his archive comes from habitats that are now lost.
The changes are profound, he said. They are everywhere.
I’ve reached this point in my life now where I don’t know how to process it, or how to express it, or what to say, but I have to tell people what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard. In fact, I don’t need to say anything, this information is revealed through the soundscape.
There are some signs of optimism at Sugarloaf Ridge. Ronnie has installed 40 cameras around the park and has taken 60,000 photos over the past five years. He said there are some hopeful signs, such as black bears and mountain lions moving into the area. Now 85, Krause says he has very little hearing left: He is almost completely deaf in his right ear and has some hearing loss in his left ear. He could no longer hear the subtle changes in sounds that he could before. ‘This is a loss that I deeply regret, but one that I have learned to live with,’ he said.
Still, he’s looking forward to spring and his next album at Sugarloaf Ridge. He hopes there will be signs of recovery this year. He says the stories conveyed through the voices of these critters will tell us all we need to know, and it’s worth it. When we finally learn how to listen.
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