THERE’S A bullfinch coming, it’s about to pop out of that gate, a sparrowhawk’s in pursuit, five, four, three, two, one… there!’ said Gary. And, sure enough, a male bullfinch came bowling through the gap in the hedge, a male sparrowhawk close behind, full stretch, keening at the finch’s tail feathers just as Gary had predicted. My eyes (or, that should read, my ears) were truly opened to the untapped potential of our senses when I went out birdwatching with a blind man. This oxymoron of an experience happened when I had been out recording an item for a BBC radio show. I have recorded hundreds of such pieces over the years but this one had a lasting effect on me, one which I use every single day.
We had arranged to meet up with Gary at a prearranged location, a field centre, buried in the ancient folds of the Dorset countryside. It was a verdant and complex patchwork of greens of at least a dozen shades separated from each other by frothy hedgerows, fizzing with the pink, delicate, aromatic blooms of quickthorn and the lime-tinted pads of elder, which, from a distance, looked like trails of foam.
This terrestrial feast for the eyes was further enhanced and complemented by the azure sky and its flocks of sliding white clouds. Birds were in full procreative swing and the bees, having taught them all they know, were at it themselves, throwing themselves, with the rest of the pollinating insect hordes, at any one of the many hedgerow blooms.
Initially, in my gauche naivety, having met Gary in the car park of the field centre, I experienced a pang of sadness. Here I was with a fellow human, a biophile like me, a naturalist who wasn’t able to witness the English springtime in all of its fecund frenetic fornication. For Gary there was no electromagnetic stimulus, no potential difference firing the neurons in his optic nerve. Which, quite simply, meant no flowers, no diaphanous damselfly, no lazy green-veined white butterfly, no inflated bullfinches bursting with territorial pride, no nothing, as far as I could see.
But, as it happens, I couldn’t see very far at all. Like most of my species with a fully functional quota of senses, I was simply not using them right. I was about to be shown up as being decidedly short-sighted. The bullfinch and the sparrowhawk were not only identified by the sounds they made. A combination of an accurate mental map of his surroundings and an instantaneous mental overlay of other more subtle audio clues were brought together to give a very clear notion of what was going on.
Gary explained to me that the alarm call of the bullfinch was the starting point, then the alarm calls of the swallows and house martins that cut sweeping dashes high above our heads told Gary that there was an aerial predator around (like many birds, they have predator-species-specific alarm calls); the short, staccato flitt, flitt, flitt of the barn swallows was enough to identify a bird of prey. This and the Doppler effect of both the bullfinch call and the audio wave of the hirundines overhead tracking with the predator, plus a bit of knowledge as to how different birds hunt, gave Gary the rest of the picture. This was birding beyond binoculars. Amazing though this demonstration in refined listening was, I also had to acknowledge that his was not some superpower. Gary wasn’t wearing any kind of Lycra and yet his perceptiveness of the world around him was to me akin to Marvel’s Daredevil. It got me really thinking about what it was I was regularly missing and from that moment on, I’ve endeavoured to improve my sensory awareness of the world around me, wherever I am.
Up until that point I was like the majority of us, bumbling around in the world, my eyes doing most of the sensory donkey work. As I am a visually oriented creature, it’s easy for my other senses to be swamped, their input not to be logged, the neurons they fire off to be ignored, their sensations never registered, in favour of our overly obsessive orbs. It was as if my eyes had led my other senses astray. I was seeing at the expense of hearing.
It’s easy to believe the overwhelming, overruling view that our sense of hearing is rubbish. The textbooks tell us lots about bats and cats, dolphins and dogs and their incredible audio responses to sound. It’s true that all of these animals have unique adaptations and abilities to perceive sounds that are out of our audio range, particularly in the higher-frequency register; a fact that we’ll come back to a bit later on, but one that is useful to keep in mind at all times when you are being in nature.
Most of our modern lives are full of noise, our ears are stuffed with and over-stimulated by sounds of our own generating. As I’m trying to write this, I’m being audibly distracted; my ears are assaulted by sounds I don’t want to be hearing. They’re being bombarded by tree surgeons working on a neighbour’s overgrown hedge, my wife kicking the hoover into action downstairs, the computer fan making a whirr, the hard drive ticking at every input of the keypad, and although there are birds outside my window, continuously communicating (I can see their chests puffing and their bills opening), I can’t hear them very easily, not unless I make a conscious effort to focus in on them.
A modern human accepts the background audio wallpaper of their everyday existence almost without question. We’ve acclimatised ourselves to accept the sea of white noise that is a product of our contemporary lifestyle, our cocooned and sheltered world of our own making; the shuffling of flat feet, the rustle of synthetic fabrics, jingling zippers and electronic notifications. Noise cloys to humanity. There are many tiers to this audio obstruction between us and nature.
With around 50 per cent of humanity living in an urban civilised environment, that’s half of the population that is less connected to the natural world and a natural experience of it, obstructed and influenced by anthropogenic factors. How we relate to the world via sound waves is underappreciated. Most of us are not aware of our personal audio pollution, a fug of sound that follows us. As a country boy, I find simply sleeping in a room with the incessant background thrum of industrial air conditioning units impossible, it invades my primary audial cortex, and even this mechanical murmur is drowned out by a yet higher tier of decibel-producing machines, the permeating rumble of rubber on tarmacadam or steel against steel.
So, is it any wonder that when first we’re exposed to a natural soundscape, we’re so deafened by the silence? We don’t perceive how noisy we actually are or the sonic signature of everything. The wind moving through the different species of tree, needle, leaf, bare branch or full foliage, or the more subtle soundings of a bird’s syrinx (more on what this is later), are sounds lost to our modernised ears.
We need to become more aware of our own personal acoustics, not only to aid our observations but also to gain valuable information about our immediate environment.
It’s a really difficult message to get across. When I accompany others out into a field situation, rarely am I pleasantly surprised by their field skills – whether it’s trying to get into intimate proximity to timid and highly strung animals like pine martens or deer, leading a dawn-chorus walk, or simply going for a nature walk. The first thing to tackle is the personal noise.
Choice of clothing is part of this. Obviously, if we all walked around without a stitch on, we would be as nature intended. I suggest you try it sometime, it really does make you appreciate what an audio ball and chain the draperies and decoration of everyday life can be. True, this is probably taking your personal rewilding to a level you might not be prepared to go to, and, indeed, it is rarely socially acceptable – unless you are a naturist naturalist (a sentence guaranteed to confuse). However, there are ways and means to explore this which are outside the immediate scope of the book. But you get the point. Our wrappings hinder us in as many ways as they help us.
The best compromise you can make is to wear non-rustling clothing; there are plenty of options, from clothing made from natural fibres to those with a waterproof barrier layer integrated in such a way that it isn’t on the outside. Those who spend a lot of time out of doors often speak of layers, with the shell layer being the outermost one. Sure, this has a function, but it is often this waterproof and windproof shell that creates the biggest din. Try walking with someone dressed from head to toe in Goretex. The swishing noise made by thigh rubbing against thigh or the enthusiastic swinging of the arms is at best mildly irritating with its high-frequency range and rhythm, interfering with the incoming cues coming towards your ears from the environment. But, at worst, that same ‘whispering, walking sound’ is being emanated in the higher registers. The same frequency that many other creatures reserve as their emergency bandwidth and to which they are highly tuned as a necessity of survival. Many alarm calls of birds and mammals have high-frequency components to them. Have you ever opened a packet of crisps or unravelled a sweet wrapper in the presence of a sleeping hamster or rabbit? If it doesn’t immediately awake, it certainly flinches. These high-frequency alarm sounds are designed to not travel too far – that way they can have a directional component to them. The sound says here I am, this is where the threat lies.
When I sit quietly in a wood, I can track with my ears the progress of a predator, often a dog that has slipped its lead, simply by the high-pitched alarm calls of robins, wrens and blue tits. A well-known birdwatcher’s trick to inveigle a skulking warbler to show its face for long enough to be identified is a noise that goes something like pisshhtt – in essence it’s an alarm call that makes the bird pop up, out of preprogrammed necessity, an instinctive need to know, before it scarpers into the thicket.
This is pretty much the effect that many of us obliviously have on the natural world around us; we are a walking, and often talking, alarm call.
So the first thing is to dampen and eliminate that rustle. It’s the same rules as in the previous chapter on how best to notice things, and it goes back to the speed with which you are moving: the more haste you make, the more noise you emit; it’s as simple as that. Theoretically, it’s possible to be wearing a bin liner and move like a fairy’s breath if you do it slowly enough.
Simplify your profile. Once I met a couple who bred llamas. Their animals were their family and they would come into their cottage kitchen, a warm and welcoming, cluttered room, with dressers piled with plates and other crockery, bottles and jars on every surface, and yet the llamas would come in and walk around, even with packs on, and not knock a thing off a single surface; they seemed to have an uncanny highly developed sense of personal spatial awareness. Be a llama. You can help yourself by simplifying your profile. Carry as little as you can, avoid too many things with straps that can snag. If I can, I try and get everything in my pockets and therefore choose field jackets which are well provided with storage solutions. Backpacks are best if they are no bigger than the size of your back and as slim in profile as you can get away with.
Be aware of the noise that fastening might be making as well. Zip pulls are the most frequent offender, a small clinking bell, announcing your presence to all and sundry with sensitive ears. Poppers are best kept closed or they might knock together, and if you’ve got Velcro – well, just carefully choose your moment when you decide to pull the two fabrics apart.
How you place your feet without sound is certainly a habitual movement you need to develop. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve spent quite a bit of time with various hunting-gathering cultures around the world and something they’ve all got in common is how they move through the landscape.
This first came to my attention several years ago, when working with the Maasai people. I was filming their extraordinary symbiosis with a small bird called a honeyguide. The bird alerts the villagers to the fact that it’s found a bees’ nest and then it leads them through the bush with a distinctive ‘follow me’-type contact call. So we followed them, following the bird, with the hope of discovering a wild bees’ nest – at which point, we’d have the punchline to the film narrative, the bird would have its bee larvae and all the wax it could consume and the Maasai would have their sweet gold.
All was going well, as we snaked our way through the crispy, crunchy dry bush of this part of Kenya, until a small hiccup in the communications between the bird and the Maasai occurred. The bird had, in its over-eagerness to get to the nest, dropped us, or it may have been the fact that a camera crew with all its incongruous kit, weight and bush-tangling cables had slowed the expedition down. Whatever the reason, the bird had either got ahead of us or changed its mind and gone quiet. Our Maasai friends, seeing how hot and slow we were becoming, told us to rest up at the side of the trail while they went off to find the whereabouts of the bird.
Twenty minutes later they found me sitting on a dead tree, head in my hands, quietly sweating cobs in the shade as I awaited their return. Without hearing the sibilance of a single dry leaf, or even feeling the displacement of the dry air, there was a tap on my shoulder. They had relocated the bird, but the honeyguide and its special relationship with the Maasai wasn’t the only thing now on my mind. Something else, much more useful to me, had piqued my interest. I wanted to know how our guide had managed to move so silently? How had he executed his catlike approach? I made it my business to find out, I wanted to own the secret to his spectral walk.
The ground was carpeted in a biscuit-litter of leaves, each one as dry as old bone, without a molecule of moisture to quieten their complaints when trodden on. It was like trying to walk silently on potato crisps, without making a crunch and without losing speed.
My first question was why? Why did he feel the need to walk so quietly? It wasn’t as if the bees would hear him coming and buzz off, and the honeyguide was positively craving his presence. The Maasai would also occasionally quietly whistle and talk to the bird, a way of reassuring it we were still coming, and that we were still intent on upholding our part of the deal.
My Maasai guide told me that it was simply what they did, a good habit to get into; then, after a little more thought, he added that in a land where there are large predators and other creatures that could cause harm to your person, being part of the background, a no-noise in the natural soundscape, was how you avoided trouble. This ability to not attract unwanted attention to yourself is a fundamental part of knowing what’s around, and being aware of what else is walking the bush and treading the soil with you. It is a vital part of everyday survival. It’s not simply about hunting, it’s an important part of not being hunted. The aim is to be at one with nature, to sound like the wind, the rain, the trees, the animals, the birds and the insects. This way you don’t attract attention and the danger that can sometimes come with it.
The method my guide had was very much the same as that of almost any other indigenous person I have ever spent time with. Various Native American tribes, the Jahai of Malaysia, the San and Himba people of Namibia, the Irula in India and the Makushi of Guyana all walk with the same careful consideration. Barefoot is best, but many were nearly as effective in their sandals or flip-flops – though several would remove these for the purpose of stalking or walking towards quarry only to reposition them on their feet when they had finished their business and they were relaxed and off duty. Here in the Western world we tend to do exactly the opposite.
A (very) quiet walk in the countryside
The basic technique is again centred on full awareness and focus. You think about walking and you tend to think of feet and maybe legs, but a good wild walk is done with the complete coordination of your entire body; it’s as much about balance as it is about where and how you place your feet. So with this in mind, let’s start about as far away from your feet as you can get.
Breathing steadily, through your nose and from your diaphragm, is as much part of this as are your feet. A technique familiarly practised in the martial arts, its purpose is the same. It keeps you calm, mindful and at peace and helps you focus and move with famed stealth. It also has many advantages over the other option of breathing through your mouth: you can engage your sense of smell, your throat is less likely to become dry and tickly, you conserve more moisture (important if it’s hot), and your nose naturally filters debris and dust which might cause you to cough (and therefore make noise) if it was to lodge in your throat. In addition to this, a sneeze reflex is generated from the nose and can, in most cases, be suppressed by pressing down on your top lip with a finger (this intercepts the nerve pathway that set up the sneeze reflex in the first place, a sort of neural short cut) or at least muffled, whereas a cough, on the other hand, usually originates from the throat and is something that you can’t really control.
Your feet should be the main points of contact with the environment and therefore how to place these on the ground is vital to successful quiet walking. As you move, you have to be aware not just of obstacles, but of the substrate you walk on too. Choose the path least likely to crunch or rustle. If you’re walking along a woodland path, step on the green stuff; grass, moss or clear soil is preferable and mutes your steps while step-amplifying dead vegetation and loose gravel and stone is to be avoided. If you’re off the path or have to move through vegetation, choose the clearest route through, picking up and moving any obstacles likely to snag or catch.
How you step is obviously quite important. Your tread should be slow and deliberate; the full weight of your body is not brought down in one go, but slowly applied in a roll, with no lateral foot movement at all – any slip or slide creates noise. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of the economics of moving while you walk. Noise is created by a superfluous movement, its energy wasted as sound energy. So if you are moving with your ultimate efficiency, you shouldn’t make much sound at all. A good practice is to try walking slowly with your shoe laces untied – any dragging of the lace will emphasise any sideways movement.
Imagine peeling a flat foot off the ground by the toes, but in reverse. Heel first, the foot is rolled into place, through the ball of your foot to your toes last. If you’re stepping backwards, it’s the same technique in reverse, the toes first, then the ball of the foot and heel. This rolling, peeling walk can help you move quietly over the most potentially noisy ground. If you place your foot carefully and gradually, you can feel if there is anything under it that might sound, such as a twig or a particularly scrunchy leaf, in which case you can abort the step and relocate it to another spot. It’s key to not put all of your full weight down on your leading foot until you are sure it’s a good step; in this way you avoid a heavy thump and you are more likely to feel any noise-prone obstacle underneath.
It can help a lot if you bend the knees and, when you’re getting very close, you need to slow right down, making tiny steps. Your footsteps should fall just behind each other. You can also minimise the risk of noise even further and go into super-stealth mode, which entails the same rolling action but this time using the outstep of your foot, effectively walking on the edges; it’s quite uncomfortable for long periods of time, but for a short final creep in close, it’s a handy technique to know about.
Another trick familiar to those who watch cowboy movies is the cross-walk, this is handy for moving a little faster and involves standing perpendicular to the direction in which you want to travel. With feet slightly spread and knees bent, swing your following foot in front of your stationary one, then, when this is paced, swing your following foot back around to the starting position.
I have come across variations on all of these themes. The ‘fox walk’ involves not putting any weight on the front foot until it is completely placed the ground. The outer edge of the foot is placed in contact with the ground along its whole length. Then, when it’s in position, the foot rolls sideways so that the rest of the underside of the foot makes contact with the ground. If all this is done, before the weight is placed on it, then it is possible to reposition the foot in a better place. If you keep your stride length small, you’ll have quite an arc of space available to reposition your foot within.
The ‘weasel walk’ for close approach and stalking involves curling your toes up and placing the outside ball of the foot down first, then rolling it down towards your instep, then the heel, then the toes. The ‘cat walk’ involves pointing your toes towards the ground on almost cartoon tip-toes and then rolling from the edge inwards, before bringing down the heel; this is done really slowly, while all the time feeling for obstacles and things that might produce a sound and give away your presence.
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Try to be aware of the rhythm of your movement; there is no sound that stands out from the random tangled chaos of sound, the wind in the trees, the rustle of leaves and the gurgle of running water, so much as a regular beat of footfalls. So try and break up your natural pace with regular stops and pauses as well as changes in pace (also useful for getting quick bearings and sounding out your vicinity).
There is no greater demonstration of the connectedness of human nature than that seen when out with a monkey-searching party with the Penan people in Sarawak or when tagging along on a woodland-management deer stalk in Hampshire, though the two are separated by over seven thousand miles.
The environment and the quarry as well as a substantial difference in the amount of clothing each hunting party is wearing is very different, but what they share in common is the way they move and collaborate and synchronise their movement, in order to achieve the same goal: namely, to outwit a creature of prey, and one that has an ear open for the movements of a predator. The rules of the game are the same.
When in a group, another factor needs to be taken into account: you need to be in unison, and the dance becomes one that is choreographed by the leader. You have to become much more aware of all the others in your party. This means primarily matching the footfalls of those in front of you. By timing the moment your foot is placed on the ground with that of the person in front of you, effectively you are creating just one audio disturbance at a time, one set of footfalls to be heard, if they’re to be heard at all.
When walking in sync like this, try and notice how the ground responds to the person in front. Does it sink? Squelch? Did it make a noise? If it didn’t, try literally stepping in their footprints; they’ve tried and tested the ground for you. If it did, then try and find a better option, but all the while try to match left with left and right with right, shadow the cadence of your leader.
Recently, how automatic and first nature this way of walking becomes was illustrated when I took an enthusiastic group of young college lads from Winchester out into the New Forest with the stalking team that manages this particular woodland. The aim was to try and get them to ringside seats at a rutting stand of fallow deer, to utilise these basic stalking techniques in order to get close to these large and impressive mammals as they are engaged in one of nature’s most spectacular breeding displays. However, when we set off, I realised that we had to go back to basics. I hadn’t appreciated just how inefficient we can be with our footfalls. Every time we stopped or paused in the woods, trying to listen out for the guttural grunting of a rutting buck, the boys kept moving. While we were no longer making forward progress, the boys didn’t stop moving their feet; they took it as a time when nothing was happening, so they kept on kicking about the leaves. Each was foot-fidgeting to his own rhythm and the group was unwittingly creating a sound blot on the woodland soundscape, a din of shuffling dissonance – all without really being aware that they were doing it. After a few basic lessons, they soon got the hang of it and with real silky stealth and economic footfalls, they took off on their own – from undisciplined naturalists to making contact with the innate hunter-gatherer in a matter of minutes. The result was a close encounter and unforgettable moment with a spectacular mammal at its finest, a life-long skill and a deep-routed connection with part of themselves that had been dormant up until this moment in their lives.
One final thing: while all this seems a lot to concentrate on, you’ll start off consciously going through each step one at a time, which is in itself a healthy, mindful thing to be doing, but in time this will become second nature and, if used a lot, first nature; it is, after all, how we are meant to be – all you’ve done is make contact with a long-lost you.
Play around with the various techniques to find one that works best for you in a variety of situations and, in addition, be aware of the fact that you are never the only thing out there making a noise, which is the whole point of this chapter. Listen for patterns in the ambient soundtrack of your chosen habitat. Move when the wind blows, or a plane flies over, and you’ll mask your own sounds and thus use the acoustic cover they provide to your own advantage.