BOOKSBOOKS
that scientists are only just
beginning to discover.
Birds take centre stage,
each species’ call honed to
its physical environment.
A Carolina wren expends
between 10 and 25 per cent
of its energy in song-making.
Urban birds have to spend
extra energy, singing higher,
louder and faster than their
rural counterparts. City birds,
like city people, “swim,
always, within a sea of
low-pitched noise”.
Haskell dwells on whales.
Humpbacks come up with
new songs in an “innovation
zone” off the coast of
Australia, he explains, and
the songs spread around the
world in mere months. They
spread, in part, because of
an invisible channel of water
about 800m down, a “watery
lens” trapped between the
warmer upper waters and the
colder, denser depths, which
bends sound back into itself,
whether emanating from
above or below.
Whale song once filled the
oceans. So did an even more
bizarre array of creaks and
clacks. Sperm whales,
alongside dolphins, porpoises
and narwhals, among 72 other
cetacean species, use sound
for echo-location, penetrating
not just the waters but other
animals, which they can
“see” inside using their “x-ray
touch”. Or they could, before
propellers blinded them.
Large container ships makeWho would be a whale today?
NATURE
James McConnachie
Sounds Wild and Broken
Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s
Creativity and the Crisis of
Sensory Extinction
by David George Haskell
Faber £20 pp430The miraculous
sounds of the
animal kingdom
— and the harm
being caused by
noisy humans
a marine racket equivalent to
a jet on take-off, Haskell says,
and boat-engine frequencies
overlap with those of echo-
location, creating sonic fog.
The singing of whales used
to be poignant. Now it is
heartbreaking. Oceanic noise
pollution has doubled every
decade since the mid-20th
century, and the air guns used
today for sonic surveys, in
search of oil, are torture.
Emitting bangs of 260
underwater decibels every
10 or 20 seconds, they echo
across oceans, ceaselessly.
No wonder whales strand
themselves in “frenzied bids
to escape the water”.
Ultimately this book is an
appeal to connect to nature
by listening, and Haskell
is attentive himself. He
describes playing the violin,
for instance, as a way to
connect through deep
evolutionary time to ancient
vertebrates who first listened
through the lower jaw —
bones that evolved to become
parts of our ear. I love that.
But the rhapsodic and
empathetic, as in so many
nature books, drift towards
the pious and performative.
Listening to a pied
butcherbird, Haskell’s
“brain’s aesthetic processes
are aglow, maxed out by tonal
quality, melodic creativity”.
And the chapters towards
the end, on human noises,
are full of interesting snippets
but feel tacked on. Haskell has
a go on a Palaeolithic flute. He
reports on a Japanese
“soundscapes”
project. But he writes
best, I feel, when he
stays in the wild. When the
sound of a cricket transports
him — and us — to the first
days of song on Earth. cDavid George Haskell is best
known for The Forest Unseen,
a meditative but richly
informed study of a square
metre of old Tennessee forest.
This book expands radically
on that, exploring the sounds
of an entire planet, from
crickets’ stridulation — one of
the most ancient animal songs
of all, dating back 270 million
years — to birdsong and
human music-making. And
human noise pollution: to the
planetary cacophony, this
book adds its own anguished
environmental cry.
Haskell is a professor of
biology at the University of the
South, Tennessee, and the best
parts of his book are scientific.
Sound is so fascinatingly, and
tellingly, unfamiliar. Our outer
ears, for instance — the flappy
bits — did you even know they
were called pinnae? Working
with the ear canal, they can
amplify sound by up to 20
decibels — like walking across a
room to stand next to someone
speaking. They also locate a
sound’s source by modulating
frequencies coming from
different directions, allowing
the brain to perform a kind of
unconscious triangulation
when we move our heads.
Haskell, however, is most
interested in nonhuman
sounds. In the tree crickets
that cut holes in leaves to
amplify their stridulation. In
how no reptile can suck, and
mammals’ advanced vocal
abilities are the result, in part,
of how mouths evolved to
suckle. In how insects hear
with their feet, tuning in to
a “parallel
world of
sound” to
our own — a
vibration-based
sonic universe(^) MARK WONG/ALAMY
Heartbreaking Whales are
tortured by the sonic surveys
used to detect oil
28 3 April 2022