50 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
PROFILECAROLYN JENSEN/NPRT
he first time Roger Payne heard a whip-poor-will, a noctur-
nal bird named for its distinctive calls, was as a child while
visiting friends of his family in New Jersey. He sat capti-
vated by the sounds for hours, deeply moved by the boldness of
the bird, whose seemingly endless song rang out fearlessly into
the darkness. “In the dead of night, when one would have thought
of all kinds of reasons not to draw attention to yourself, it never-
theless did,” Payne recalls.
Now in his 80s, Payne still vividly remembers that night. He’s
only heard whip-poor-wills on a few more occasions since then—
and opportunities to hear them have become increasingly scarce.
Populations of the bird have steadily declined in recent decades
and are expected to continue falling as climate change destroys
their already scarce habitats, which are primarily the forests of
the eastern United States. For Payne, this is just one example of
the degradation of the natural world.
Whales are another example. Payne has spent decades
studying these animals—their songs, behavior, and the harms
caused to them by human activities. This work has taken him
on more than a hundred expeditions in Bermuda, Argentina,
and elsewhere. But the force that has driven him to conduct all
this work can be linked back to the imperiled whip-poor-will,
whose haunting song enchanted him as a young boy. “All my life
I’ve seen the destruction of wild places and the destruction of
beauty,” Payne says. “I became determined that I would try to
do something.”BATS, BIRDS, AND BUGS
Payne was born in New York City in 1935. With a mother who
was a professional violinist and a father who was an engineer,
both music and science naturally wove their way into Payne’s
life. Though he chose science as a career, he has been a lifelong
cellist, and his ear for music ended up playing a crucial role in
his scientific discoveries. “Almost everything I’ve ever done traces
back to music,” he says.
Payne initially considered following in his father’s footsteps
and applied to an engineering program at MIT. After getting
accepted, however, he realized that he was more interested in
animals. He chose to study biology at Harvard University instead.
There, he met Donald Griffin, a zoologist who, with neuroscientist
Robert Galambos, had discovered that bats echolocate at a
frequency humans can’t hear. Griffin was one of the instructors
of Payne’s introductory biology class, and as part of the course,
students were invited to Griffin’s laboratory. There, Griffin eagerlyplayed the group recordings of oilbirds, a South American bird
that also echolocates, at a frequency that humans can hear.
“It was clear that [Griffin] was really interested in what he
was doing,” Payne says. “He couldn’t hide that.” Intrigued, Payne
joined Griffin’s lab, and then conducted his undergraduate thesis
with the zoologist, investigating the directional sensitivity—the
responsiveness to the location of sounds—of bat ears. Several
years later, the pair would meet again and work together for
almost two decades. “He became one of the two most important
influences in my life,” Payne says.
The other major influential figure for Payne was Cornell
entomologist To m Eisner. Payne met Eisner during his
doctoral studies at Cornell, working in the lab of ornithologist
William Dilger. Payne also worked as a lab assistant to Eisner,
who took Payne on after seeing him biking through campus
with a cello attached to his back. Eisner was a pianist, and
the two would occasionally play together, bonding over music
as well as science. Eisner “was the man who really taught
me biology,” Payne says, and instilled in him a fascination
for insect biology, so much so that he went on to investigate
moths for his postdoctoral studies with Kenneth Roeder at
Tufts University. As he had done with bats and owls, Payne
studied the directional sensitivity of hearing in moths—
specifically, how they identify the location of an approaching
predator using an acoustic system that consists of only a few
cells (J Exp Biol, 44:17–31, 1966).
Despite his success, Payne says he wanted to find more
meaning in his work. “I was doing stuff that interested me—and
some other people—but it did not serve the purpose of stopping
the destruction of the wild world,” he says. He wondered: What
animal that depends heavily on hearing could he study while also
contributing towards preventing its destruction?
The answer, he determined, was whales.LISTENING TO THE SEA
One afternoon while he was still at Tufts, Payne heard a report
that a dead whale had washed ashore on a nearby beach. When
he drove there after work, he beheld a distressing sight. A dolphin
had been mutilated—previous visitors had cut the animal’s tail,
carved initials into its side, and stuck a cigarette into its blowhole.
“It was at that moment that I thought that if there was any way I
could find a way of doing it, I would try to learn something about
whales that would make it less likely that people would do that
to them,” Payne says.Roger Payne used his discovery that whales sing songs to convince the world
that the animals are worth saving.BY DIANA KWONWatcher of Whales