Healthy Soundscapes and Native Plants
Mary DellosaShare
Healthy Soundscapes and Native Plants
What is a Soundscape and why does it matter? When we listen to healthy ecosystems we should be hearing a plethora of voices, the noise of a breathing, growing, singing, ecosystem. The music of our landscapes can be an indicator of our biodiversity and healthy ecological relationships. Many of our soundscapes have gone silent, and we don’t even realize what we’ve lost, but tuning in to their lack might just be what we need to revitalize the chorus.
Soundscape Ecology definition from Wikipedia: Soundscape ecology is the study of the acoustic relationships between living organisms, human and other, and their environment, whether the organisms are marine or terrestrial.
Soundscape Ecology is a branch of science that is shedding light on our acoustic codependence within our vibrational terrains and the effect individual species have on one another’s wellbeing. In an NPR interview Bryan Pijanowski, professor of Landscape Ecology at Purdue University sheds light on the types of interaction our ecological sounds have on one another: “One goal of this research is to understand how animals interact with each other — even across species. Some silent newts, for example, follow frog sounds to find the best breeding ponds”.
We begin to understand the importance of recognizing sound and its effect on our landscapes when we listen to them. Much like it takes a good listener to understand a friend’s troubles or joys, so do our natural sounds communicate. New studies in the world of botany and plant sciences are challenging what we have known about even the plants in our environments. In her book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Zoë Schlanger, a staff reporter at The Atlantic, explains that some scientist now believe flowers themselves are acoustically shaped to pick up the frequency of their pollinators, enabling appropriate timing for the release of pollen.
Essentially, we are in a constant relationship with our ecosystems where sound is a metric we can use to measure our biodiversity health. If we think of it through the spectrum of acoustics, our landscapes should be an orchestra of players in tune, performing a masterpiece of thousands of years of evolutionary practice!
Voices Return
When we came to our land it was so degraded, and the ecology so depleted of life the very soundscape was quiet. We had few to no birds. Even crickets and cicadas at night were rare; essentially the voice of a bubbling, living biologically rich landscape had diminished to barely a whisper. At the time I remember listening to a podcast about the loss of our soundscapes over time, due of course to habitat loss. I felt a shift in my mind about the way I was looking at my surroundings. I felt like my thought landscape was becoming more multidimensional: there was the landscape yes, but there was also the soundscape, the unheard voices I suddenly realized I wasn’t hearing.
We began a process of not just gardening, not just planting, but also listening. What did the land need to help heal it? How could we build back up that marvelous symphony and nurture the hope we carried for life and all its potential energy?
Tending Wild hope
It is a curious thing to hope; one of our deepest human qualities is the persistent dream of what could be, of that delightful tomorrow and all its tender possibilities. From a biological standpoint hope is a survival instinct that has kept us alive in our search for food, water or shelter, allowing us the imagination to create a better future for our children.
There is so much grief in our culture for the loss of species, so much fear for things that feel out of our control. As we co-healed this piece of earth we steward, it became evident how incredibly hopeful our impact can be and how quickly we can make immense changes for good. We have witnessed the return of hundreds of voices, the choir in the trees, in the water, the meadows. Voices rose out of the quiet and we learned to recognize them by their songs: the warbling ghost like call of the Eastern Screech Owl, the Barred Owls strange deep crow, Whippoorwills, Leopard Frogs, Bobwhites, Gray Tree Frogs, Cicadas, the hum of wild Honeybees, the Kingfisher, and the Pileated Woodpecker. These voices have become a rhythm to our lives, telling us when the seasons are changing; a primal beauty once lost without our noticing coming home again.
What our journey has illustrated is that ecological restoration is very attainable. Tuning in to the soundscapes and hearing old voices sing anew is not just deeply wonderful, it might just be a biological cue of safety telling us our environment has food in abundance. Our love of flowers, anthropologists believe, developed because as hunter gatherers, seeing a flower meant fruit was to come. We took note and rested easier with the knowledge we would come back to forage those fruits. Maybe that’s why so many of us feel so happy in a flower garden: the deepest part of our evolutionary biology is being met, survival. The same is true of rich soundscapes: all those voices mean we will have enough to eat, abundance is literally singing us to sleep.
Native Plants and Keystone Species
How do we encourage healthy soundscapes, and restore symphonic habitats right in our backyards? Native plants and Keystone species are critical in reestablishing the voices of our landscapes. What are native plants and their role in regenerative symphonics?
Native plants are those species that have co-evolved in a particular ecological region, becoming interdependent. These ecoregions are deeply area specific and have adapted to local soils and climate conditions over thousands of years. That codependence creates abundant ecosystem health when it’s thriving and it is devastating when those regions’ species are fragmented and lost. Of course, we are all familiar with the Monarch and its host plant Milkweed, but this one relationship is just the tip of the iceberg with many thousands of codependents forming the foundation for our ecologies.
To dive more deeply into native plants, understanding what Keystone Species are is a perfect example of how certain individuals can play a pivotal role in restoration. In North America 14% of plants are responsible for supporting 90% of our insects. That 14% are our Keystone Species: pillars of life in a fragile ecosystem that need those insects to feed the food web from the bottom up. These species support substantially more life with many Oaks supporting up to 500 different species of insects! Songbird populations are dependent on abundant caterpillars to raise their young because of their protein content and soft exoskeleton. Without enough caterpillars our songbirds cannot raise their broods. If they disappear so do our many of our vertebrates who rely on them as a food source. Our amphibians and fish rely on insects to survive, they too would disappear, as would our larger vertebrates, including us!
Larger animals like Hawks, Herons, Bats, Turtles, Foxes, Racoons, Coyotes, Owls, and many others tend to get more attention when it comes to conservation because they are more visible yet none of them would exist without the downstream web of the food chain, and those insects that feed that web are dependent on our plants. In order to save our larger mammals, birds and amphibians (and ourselves) we have to look deeper, and when we do, we find that plants are our answer.
Tuning in
When I woke up this morning it was still dark; softly the Screech owl sang out and its mate called back. This is a voice I love, and one I want to keep for my children. Tenderly I walked out into the darkness and stood listening to the hundreds of voices, to the world awakening and singing in the joy of a new day. Our soundscape here has changed into a biodiverse symphony of sound networks. We are one family, now imagine what our world could sound like if we worked together to value plants and their impact. Our soundscapes would become orchestral, and our children’s future would be one of hope.
Here’s to raising the voices of our collective soundscapes,
Mary
Action Steps
· I have never come across a more hopeful resource than the organization founded by entomologist Doug Tallamy and his work creating Homegrown National Park. Through his website you will find a map where you can enter your zip code to find your ecoregion and from there you can find a list of Keystone Species (a term he coined) in your area, as well as lists of nursery suppliers. If you want to you can list your native plant project (no matter its size) and become a part of a larger community of people who are working towards restoration.
· Check out Garden for Wildlife where you can shop for plants within your ecoregion. This website is a part of the National Wildlife Federation, another amazing resource for learning about anything wildlife, including native plants.
· Listening and learning. This is so fun! I am constantly curious when I hear a birdcall I’ve never heard, or a voice in the night, new and wonderful. This app from Cornell University is a lot of fun and allows you to record a bird call and then learn whose voice it belongs to. This is also an opportunity to become a citizen scientist, helping them map bird migration patterns and populations.
