HOW DO we hear? Simply put, mechanical compression waves in the air are collected by our ears and turned into electrical signals which are then sent to our brain for processing. We have numerous body parts that make this possible. Our external ears (the sticky-out bits) funnel the sound waves into our ear canal until they meet the tympanic membrane, which literally translates as the ear drum. This tight membrane then flexes and sets up a chain reaction which passes the energy of the original sound waves through a series of three tiny ossicle bones in the middle ear, which then create a ripple in the fluids of the middle ear. The fluid is contained in a spiral called a cochlea (a snail) and this is lined with tiny hairs called stereocilia, which are bent by the pressure wave travelling through the fluid. This mechanical movement of the hairs is then converted to electrical impulses, which are sent to the brain and processed. That’s the simplified mechanics of how we hear. What we hear, however, is a little more involved.
We often use the words ‘frequency’ and ‘pitch’ when we describe the sounds we hear, quite often without actually understanding what these words mean and, indeed, the differences.
Sound waves are pulses of sound and their frequency is the number of these waves that occur during a given amount of time – a high number of these vibrations creates a sound we might refer to as high-pitched, while a low number of sound waves gives us the opposite, a noise that is low-pitched.
We can hear sounds that fall within quite a large range of frequencies and if you’ve got a healthy pair of ears, it’s possible that you might be able to hear sounds that fall anywhere within the 20 Hz to 20 kHz range (20 hertz and 20 kilohertz – hertz is the number per second). In laboratory conditions we can do even better than that, being able to pick up sounds as low as 12 Hz and as high as 28 kHz, but in order to hear these extremes the sounds need to be really loud, which brings us on to the subject of pitch. A shrew’s high-frequency ultrasonic squeaks, or the low rumbling subsonic sounds of a herd of elephants, are sounds that are inaudible to us; they don’t have a pitch that we register, and therefore cannot be described. Anyone who has used a ‘bat detector’ will be familiar with this. These electronic devices are simply translators of the high-frequency sounds made by bats, which, via some technological alchemy, step down these frequencies to a pitch we can hear. The sound we get out of a bat detector’s speakers is not the sound that bats actually make to each other, it’s simply a way to enable us to hear some of their vocalisations.
Our sense of hearing is quite a complicated one and our abilities to discern certain sound frequencies vary considerably. From the age of eight, our hearing deteriorates. There is nothing quite as frustrating as taking a mixed group of families, from toddlers to grandparents, out on a summer’s walk and only those below the age of twenty being able to hear the protracted ticking whirr of a colony of cone-heads (a kind of bush cricket that has swapped the shrubs for long grass), or to be on a bat walk and have only a handful of the group able to pick up the lower-frequency social calls of tiny pipistrelles as they loop the loop above their heads.
Some people hold on to the higher ends of their hearing range into their forties and fifties. Others lose very specific mid-range frequencies; some lose ability in one ear or the other. There is even a difference between the sexes: on the whole, women have a better sense of sound. Unless you’re aware of the symphony of nature sounds from an early age, there is every chance you may not realise it if your hearing has deteriorated. Sometimes it takes a group sound-sharing experience like the one just mentioned for an individual suddenly to become aware of their own shortfallings in this area.
Other factors can alter our perception of sound too, from personal health, atmospheric conditions and even the time of day or how weary we are feeling. What we hear can be a very subjective thing.
So if you’re not a healthy nine-year-old girl, you may well be reading this and perhaps thinking of giving up on ever being able to use your ears to their full potential, as your best ears are the ones you left behind in your youth. However, in spite of our personal variations and limitations, there are still plenty of ways of exploring the world of sound as a medium for a closer and more fulfilling relationship with nature.
Can you improve your hearing? Well, probably not, so this and the variables mentioned above might leave you thinking that your ears are of limited use and that trying to develop a better sense of sound, especially if you are of a certain vintage or have a known compromised sound perception, is a waste of time.
But nothing could be further from the truth. In some ways, your ears are an extension of your eyes. We hear things and then we train our gaze in that direction to confirm with our eyes what our ears first told us. Earlier, we considered the noise we ourselves might make, so now, with your own personal acoustic influence on the environment muffled and under control, you are now halfway there; the rest of the process goes on between your ears and the grey matter between them.
In the same way that looking and seeing are very different processes, the same can be said for our hearing: to hear and to listen are very different things – one being passive, with sound waves tickling the hairs in your inner ear all the time, and the other being active. Your brain decides which of these internal disruptions to your inner ear to take notice of and to process. We hear with our ears but we listen with our brains. This is good news, because it means that as long as you can hear something, you can train yourself to be better at listening.
Our ears, however, fill in that large blind spot that lies behind, above and to the sides of our head. The fact that we have two ears means that we get a degree of directionality just as with our sense of sight. This is why, if you hear a fly buzzing around the room behind you right now, you don’t need to clap eyes on it to know it is there; what’s more, you could turn around and almost instantly place your eyes on it with considerable accuracy, thanks to the directional information provided by your ears.
At one point, we could probably all listen pretty well; after all, we were proto-wild primates – but over time we develop some pretty bad habits, as the clutter of our domesticated existence vies for dominance and relevance. Remember that moment at school when, while you were staring out of the window at the fluffy white clouds, your daydreaming was invaded by your teacher calling your name? She knew your head was not in the room and as if being caught out wasn’t bad enough, she’d further humiliate you by asking you to explain what it was she had just said in front of the whole class. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t just me. To become better at listening we need to recognise what it is that’s stopping us doing it properly. As a sensory process it can be quite difficult to listen; we’re easy to distract. To really listen we need to be able to remove some of these distractions and to develop the ability to listen through a landscape, to focus on sounds both near and far, small and big.
There is no better tutor than a wild mammal, one that is much more deeply immersed in an acoustic world than we are. To have a ‘quarry’ and to try and sneak up on it is the ultimate test of your field skills. Obviously, all the other factors of stalking are in play at the same time. So, to best test your slinkiness, choose an animal that is highly reliant on its auditory senses.
As you may have guessed by now, badgers have ‘held my hand’ through quite a lot of my life. They were my ‘bears’, I guess, and in being so they taught me quite a lot about the etiquette of the wild; they helped me develop a set of skills and hone the behavioural tools in my naturalist’s kitbag. I’ve always maintained that getting close to a badger in the woods or a black rhino in an acacia thicket are pretty much the same, the only difference being the potential outcome if you get it wrong – and I have. I learned from a Swazi bushman the truth behind the saying ‘you only feel the thorns on the way down’.
Badgers are very sensitive to strange sound and really helped me in this respect. With most of my badger time being a solo activity, I had only myself accountable if a misplaced rustle or sniff sent my furry brethren scattering. My childhood badger watching was a steep learning curve. I started hiding up in the trees, looking down on them, partly because I felt ‘safe’ up and out of the way and also I was uncertain as to how they would react if they bumped into me, but also because it seemed the best place to be, if I was to avoid being seen or more likely smelt by them. However, I quickly started to push the experience; I wanted to close the gaps in my knowledge and the physical gap between me and the badgers. Doing so made seeing what was occurring in the twilight easier and, as with any intimacy with wildlife, it allows such close observations that you start to notice really subtle things, grumbles and sighs, quiet vocalisations uttered almost under the breath, or small scars and different-coloured claws. The sorts of details that are impossible to see from a few metres above the woodland floor.
The incentive to get close was such a driving factor for me that within a few months I was coming down out of the tree. If the wind direction was favourable I would sit at the base of the tree, then I started to lie down, and slowly, by increments every night, I would position myself closer and closer, until I was within a couple of metres of their front door. I was so close to them that I could hear them getting up. Low rumblings that transcended the definition of vibrations and sound seemed to come up through the soil and to my ears via my belly and I could hear their squeaky bickering and arguments too.
I would stare into the fuzzy darkness of the hole, waiting for that first glimpse of that humbug head to bob up and test the evening air. Then they would be out, sniffing, and then, when they relaxed, they would have a good scratch. Once they’d ousted the fleas and rearranged the dust and soil in their hair they would depart.
From that first glimpse in the half-light of their sett entrance to their departure from the clearing, it was critical that I kept quiet. I became unwittingly very good at it. At this sort of proximity badgers taught me not only that you must stay absolutely corpse-still, but also that even a slightly noisy breath, swallow or the sudden onset of a grumbling stomach could alert brock to your presence and prematurely end the night’s mammal watching.
How I behaved became instinctive. I was developing good ‘woodland manners’ and eliminating the bad. We are all familiar with learning manners: we were all once taught to keep our elbows off the table, not to speak with our mouths full or that we mustn’t reach across someone else’s plate. These are behavioural rules, habits that at some point in time became difficult to break. It’s exactly the same when learning how to be around wildlife.
‘Being quiet’ is a sliding scale; it means different things to different people. Depending on the circumstances, to some being quiet simply means not saying anything but in nature this often has to be ‘badger quiet’. It’s a difficult lesson to learn but, with patience and a lot of practice and plenty of disappointments, you’ll get there.
I often forget what this means and how vital it is to field craft. It’s again so simple and obvious that it’s easy to overlook. But when I have to take a party of people into a hide with no glass in its windows in order to observe nocturnal mammals, it all comes flooding back.
The moment a guest chooses an inopportune moment to scratch their arm, sniff a drip back up their nose or shift the weight from one buttock to the other, I’m reminded of my hard-won skills and lessons learned.
I’ve had a children’s badger watch cut short by one of the kids breaking wind, the building tension and subsequent relief and excitement of children seeing their first badger proving too much for one child’s bowls; a girlfriend, to whom I had promised a really close view of my badgers, got the giggles when the animal decided to try and scratch its left ear with its left rear foot, lost its balance, fell over and left us in a cloud of musky anal gland secretion and with the sight of a grey ‘bottle-brush’ rear end disappearing into the night – those who have shared one of these experiences with me will be familiar with my scoring system on how good- mannered and quiet they were. This, of course, is as much a reflection of my inabilities and generous non-patronising nature as it is any individual’s nature-watching skills.
Beat the bunny
Rabbits and deer are also excellent teachers of the subject of absolute silence and they tend to keep slightly better hours than badgers. Very few people can sneak up on a rabbit undetected, but if you can, you’ve honed your skills to such a fine degree that in my world you would be regarded as a grand master of stealth.
One excellent test of patience and your wild sense and sensibilities is an activity which I thought was something only I did when I had an afternoon to kill – until, that is, I saw TV naturalist Simon King demonstrate it on camera. It’s something I call the ‘long lie down’. I first stumbled upon this rewarding man-versus-lagomorph challenge when my portable hide, made from an old cardboard box, blew away.
As a boy, I would look for big boxes that I could turn upside down and hide in – I would cut holes in them to look out of and, by slowly lifting the box up on my back, I could, if I was careful, walk the whole thing around. It was quite effective, as I one day discovered, in all but windy weather. On this one particular day, I had stealthily, over a period of an hour or so, manoeuvred my box and myself across a large pasture until I got very close to a colony of rabbits. All was going well, but the wind was getting up and without warning the box lifted up and off. I was left awkwardly crouched on the grass like a tortoise stripped of its shell. I froze, the rabbits stopped grazing, heads and, more importantly, ears trained in my direction. I waited for the loud thudding, the staccato burst of a clump-clump-clump-clump of furry foot on turf – the rabbit equivalent of a war-time klaxon – but nothing sounded. After a few seconds, the twitching tension subsided, they flattened their ears, lowered their heads and continued about their business. I lowered my own and continued too, just this time feeling rather naked and exposed without my kitchen-appliance box to hide me. What I discovered was that I was among the rabbits and had managed to infiltrate their ever-nervous gathering.
I repeated this several times, approaching without the box, and I would find that even if the rabbits saw my coming and evacuated the open field edge, as long as I was down-wind, I could simply lie down and wait; in time, they would slowly, one at a time, come loping out of the dense thickets of bramble and blackthorn, nettle and dock, to nibble on the succulent short grasses. The ‘long lie down’ was born. I had won my stripes, I felt almost invincible, and I had achieved that which tests the guile of even the most cunning fox. I had beaten the bunny.
Deer are similarly blessed with acoustic sensitivities and to be able to ‘stalk’ effectiviely, whether you’re a photographer, a hunter or simply want to experience these animals up close, they are a worthy subject on which to test your close approach.
A word of warning here – if you are less than familiar with the larger species of deer, it might be prudent not to try for close approaches in the season of the rut. A buck or stag at this time, buoyed up by testosterone and sexual frustration, can be unpredictable and compelled to act under the influence of its hormones – it’s not unheard of for them to attack those who get too close.
In recent years I’ve started to develop an interest in stalking deer, something I’ll discuss later, but this as a skill that came quite naturally to me. A background in basic field craft and tracking is more than useful for this; it feels like something I’m meant to do. Whatever your motivations, it is an ancient skill and one that seems to satisfy a very deep, primeval connection, part of our biological evolution. Just being able to sneak up on a quarry is a pure thrill and the raw rush of clarity that fires dormant synapses and takes a neurological fast track to the core of the wild you is a key part of rewilding our experience of life.
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Stalking deer has been a real eye-opener for me – learning to read the land and interpret the signs, sounds and sights, with other skills following close behind. To be sitting in the crotch of a tree branch, dropping acorns for a herd of red deer as they pass by below you, to paddle up to a half-submerged moose while it feeds on lily tubers, pretending to be a drifting log, or simply being out for an evening stalk and getting the satisfaction of being able to walk right past a solitary sika hind without her even lifting her head – these are all some of the magical experiences that I’ve had with these animals. This is the challenge, a rich investment in time but one which gives back a hearty feeling of deep satisfaction and belonging. It’s a deep-felt vital empathy with the living world. If you can get close passage to a persecuted prey species while it is unaware that you even exist, you’ve pretty much disappeared; dissolved in the environment to such an extent that you’ve become, for moments, at least, invisible. When this is something you can achieve by design, you’ve nailed it.