Listen to the world

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/05/2025 (321 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To gather information about their environment, animals use various sensory tools. Vertebrates — fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, and others — are equipped with a complex central nervous system that continuously analyzes a staggering amount of visual, olfactory, tactile, and other data.

Other animals collect the same data using various organs and structures, such as the feathery antennae of moths or the cilia of the paramecium (the vibrating cilia surrounding the body of this tiny single-celled organism living in freshwater also allows it to move and to feed itself).

For humans, one of the senses — sight — has long since taken precedence over all others. Indeed, since the introduction of our sedentary lifestyle and the advent of widespread agriculture some 10,000 years ago, we have had to develop a way to record information about agricultural technologies or construction methods, the organization of society, or strategies for waging war on neighbouring cities or states. Necessity is the mother of invention: this is how writing came to be.

Vision has thus dominated our sensory environment, and this supremacy is highlighted by the predominance of science and technology in society.

In most fields knowledge has been passed on from one generation to the next through writing. Few societies have retained oral transmission as a major means of dissemination.

Once immersed in nature, our first instinct is therefore to use sight to decipher our immediate environment; its opportunities, its threats, its charms.

This is to the detriment of the other senses, including hearing. In doing so, we deprive ourselves of many auditory pleasures. Listen carefully, I bid you; you won’t regret it.

The next time you go for a walk in the forest, in the mountains, in the countryside, on the edge of a marsh or a lake, find a quiet spot to sit undisturbed — a tree stump, a large rock, a sandy shore — close your eyes, and listen. Nature can be heard as much as seen.

In just a few minutes, you will discover all the beautiful sounds and songs of our planet: the whispers of the wind in the pine foliage, the lapping of waves on the lakeshore. Over there, in the distance, the tap! tap! tap! of a woodpecker on the trunk of a dead tree. Nearby, on your right, the buzzing of a bumblebee brushing past you, and on your left, the rustling wings of a chickadee coming to meet you. In a damp grove, the ouistiti ouistiti ouistiti ouit! of a common yellowthroat. High in the sky, the nasal yapping of a flock of geese heading south — honk-a-honk! And, with luck, in the dense undergrowth of a young forest, the yelping of a fox.

Alas, nature’s score is threatened, as the symphony of the living world diminishes, losing texture and richness every day with each square meter encroached upon by Homo industrius, this almost-new species on the planet’s surface.

Human-generated sounds are taking up more and more space on Earth, even in the heart of the wildest natural environments.

The common loon falls silent when the jet ski arrives, the whisper of the torrent disappears beneath the cover of road traffic, and, high above, on the edge of the boreal forest, the wolverine’s grunt stops as the long convoys of lumber trucks head for the sawmills located far to the south.

These omnipresent sounds of human societies have profound effects on the ability of animals to find each other in their habitats, and therefore to reproduce, and even to feed (think of owls that hunt by ear). This noise impact even reduces the ability of forests to regenerate. How? For example, by driving jays away from a natural environment, human sounds prevent oak acorns, carried in the birds’ stomachs, from taking root and becoming the forest of tomorrow.

Nature can be heard as much as observed. Instead of the common expression “You have to see it to believe it,” shouldn’t we say “You have to hear it to believe it” more often? I certainly think so.

For if we’re not mindful, the natural world will become increasingly silent. We must then discover, rediscover, the lost songs of nature.

Michel Leboeuf is a writer and biologist. A translation of his book, Lost Songs of Nature, will be published in English this spring from Great Plains Press.