Sep 9, 2026 · 49 min · 12 segments
The conversation delves into the mystery of wilderness sounds and the limits of human perception in the wilderness. It explores various phenomena such as the Great Smoky Mountains, the invisible…
The strange thing about sound is that it doesn't leave much behind.
If you see something unusual, you can sometimes photograph it, follow it, examine tracks, compare it to the size of something else.
You can look in other places and find the similar things.
The sounds are different.
A noise can exist for three seconds and then simply disappear.
By the time you turn towards it, whatever happened is already over.
All you have left is a question.
What the fuck was that? If you spend enough time outdoors, you develop an enormous vocabulary for natural sounds without consciously realizing you're learning it.
You become familiar with sounds of the wind moving through the trees, water running through a drainage or rain, ravens arguing somewhere overhead, and coyotes carrying on in the distance.
You learn that a squirrel moving through dry leaves can briefly sound like something weighing 400 pounds.
You learn the creaks and the pops of trees and the movements of branches and the sounds made by your own clothing and equipment.
Eventually, thousands of noises become part of the background.
And you don't need to consciously identify every one of them because your brain has already decided that they belong there and that they're normal.
But occasionally the landscape uses a word you don't recognize.
I mentioned in another episode that an employee and I were standing on a cliff overlooking the Blue River in the Blue Range on the Apache-Sickridge National Forest when we heard a bird call that neither one of us recognized.
It wasn't frightening and it wasn't unusual, but it certainly wasn't a bird sound that we had ever heard.
but it immediately stood out because it was brand new, and we both noticed it simultaneously.
Eventually, we spotted the bird and figured out what it was.
It was a zoned-tailed hawk.
And if you're up here and you find or you see one, it's a pretty unique thing to see up here.
So anyway, if you're a birder, then you can geek out on that.
But that experience has always interested me because of how quickly both of us recognized that something in the landscape had changed.
when we didn't need to identify the sound to know that we hadn't heard it before.
That becomes considerably more interesting when the source isn't eventually sitting in a nearby tree.
The strange thing about sound is that it doesn't leave much behind.
If you see something unusual, you can sometimes photograph it, follow it, examine tracks, compare it to the size of something else.
You can look in other places and find the similar things.
The sounds are different.
A noise can exist for three seconds and then simply disappear.
By the time you turn towards it, whatever happened is already over.
All you have left is a question.
What the fuck was that? If you spend enough time outdoors, you develop an enormous vocabulary for natural sounds without consciously realizing you're learning it.
You become familiar with sounds of the wind moving through the trees, water running through a drainage or rain, ravens arguing somewhere overhead, and coyotes carrying on in the distance.
You learn that a squirrel moving through dry leaves can briefly sound like something weighing 400 pounds.
You learn the creaks and the pops of trees and the movements of branches and the sounds made by your own clothing and equipment.
Eventually, thousands of noises become part of the background.
And you don't need to consciously identify every one of them because your brain has already decided that they belong there and that they're normal.
But occasionally the landscape uses a word you don't recognize.
I mentioned in another episode that an employee and I were standing on a cliff overlooking the Blue River in the Blue Range on the Apache-Sickridge National Forest when we heard a bird call that neither one of us recognized.
It wasn't frightening and it wasn't unusual, but it certainly wasn't a bird sound that we had ever heard.
but it immediately stood out because it was brand new, and we both noticed it simultaneously.
Eventually, we spotted the bird and figured out what it was.
It was a zoned-tailed hawk.
And if you're up here and you find or you see one, it's a pretty unique thing to see up here.
So anyway, if you're a birder, then you can geek out on that.
But that experience has always interested me because of how quickly both of us recognized that something in the landscape had changed.
when we didn't need to identify the sound to know that we hadn't heard it before.
That becomes considerably more interesting when the source isn't eventually sitting in a nearby tree.
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