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Last week, South Florida's nature came alive for me as much through sound as through sight: the flapping of wings as a great blue heron soared up over a river; the plashing of water when an alligator slipped off the riverbank to swim away; the huffing of a manatee taking a breath at the water's surface before she slowly sank again to the river bottom to munch grass.

I was lucky. My husband and I heard those animal sounds in two exceptionally quiet locations — down an isolated road in the Everglades for the heron and the alligator, and at a Miami waterway with no boat or people traffic for the manatee.

It's becoming harder by the year for those of us who visit wilderness areas, much less seek tranquility in urban areas, to hear natural sounds. The constant thrum of noise in our daily environments causes us to tune out many sounds we hear, so that, in effect, we are undergoing a process of "learned deafness."


That was the message delivered Monday by National Park Service scientist 

 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in San Jose, Calif. — and 

If our children — and as a parent I've had this experience when our daughter was younger — don ear buds along with their backpacks when we take them into the wild, the problem becomes a kind of vicious cycle, with more and more anthropogenic sounds claiming our auditory attention.

And, of course, it's not only we ourselves who are disturbed by anthropogenic noise. In an email response to me Tuesday, Fristrup (who has the coolest job title I've come across — senior scientist at the National Park Service Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division) noted how other animals are affected too:


Christopher Solomon made a parallel point about our effect on the environment in last Sunday's 

It's not a pretty picture: humans swarming through natural areas, oblivious to the damage we cause and not even hearing what's around us as we go.

Fristrup, though, stresses that we can all push back against learned deafness and train ourselves to hear natural sounds more acutely — a process that can only help with our taking care in, and of, the wilderness. He told me about a project his team is working on, together with colleagues Bob Manning of the University of Vermont and Peter Newman of Pennsylvania State University, that involves visitors to national parks:

Fristrup's research has called up many auditory memories for me, beyond last week's visit to Florida. They include grazing bison's soft vocalizations in Yellowstone National Park, an angry ocean and angrier skies at the Jersey Shore, and octaves of birdsong in my own Virginia backyard.

To listen. To be still. To let the sounds of nature refresh us and delight us. What pleasure this brings.

Barbara J. King, an anthropology professor at the College of William and Mary, often writes about human evolution, primate behavior, and the cognition and emotion of animals. Barbara's 

 was released in paperback in April. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: 

Environmental News

Barbara J. King

Author

Our lives are now so noisy that we're at risk of shutting out natural sounds, a new study shows. Anthropologist Barbara J. King suggests stillness to listen to the world.

Can you hear nature's sounds?

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