One man in California has spent 57 years recording the sounds of natural places. Much of what he's recorded no longer exists.
His name is Bernie Krause. He started as a folk musician and an early pioneer of the Moog synthesizer. In 1968, he began carrying recording equipment into rainforests, deserts, coral reefs, African savannas, and research sites associated with scientists like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.
The Wild Sanctuary archive now contains more than 5,000 hours of recordings and over 15,000 identified species. Krause coined the term "biophony" to describe the collective sound of living organisms in a habitat and helped establish the field of soundscape ecology.
Through thousands of recordings, he observed that healthy ecosystems often partition acoustic space, with different species occupying different frequencies and times of day. On a spectrogram, an intact habitat can resemble a densely layered musical score.
When Krause revisited many of the places he had recorded decades earlier, he found that over half had become silent, severely degraded, or so altered by human activity that their original biophonies could no longer be heard. His archive preserves sounds from ecosystems that have been transformed or lost.
A turkey vulture can smell a dead animal from over a mile away, literally.
Their sense of smell is so refined that natural gas companies have used them to find pipeline leaks.
In the late 1950s, ornithologist Kenneth Stager was investigating whether turkey vultures find carrion by sight or smell, a question that had been debated since Audubon ran flawed experiments on it in the 1820s.
Stager visited engineers at California's Union Oil Company, hoping to use ethyl mercaptan (the chemical added to natural gas to make leaks detectable) as an experimental scent source. The engineers told him, "Of course turkey vultures can smell. We've known that for years."
The Union Oil engineers had been pumping high concentrations of ethyl mercaptan through pipelines and watching the sky. Ethyl mercaptan is also released by decomposing flesh, so to a vulture, a gas leak smells exactly like a dead mouse under a log.
The engineers would patrol a 42-mile section of pipeline after the dose, and wherever vultures were circling or sitting on the ground, there was a leak.
Stager confirmed it scientifically with controlled field experiments using compressed-air ethyl mercaptan emitters. His 1964 paper, "The Role of Olfaction in Food Location by the Turkey Vulture," became the definitive proof that vultures find their food by smell.
Thought my cats were acting a little weird this morning and they apparently put a catnip toy in their water bowl overnight to soak. They made catnip tea.
They're high