As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the
Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved
setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to
see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and
see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we
could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during
the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each
station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move
on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted
owls in the vicinity.
This meant we were working at night in the woods.
There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls,
a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars,
bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing
the wildlife, we also heard it. Of course we were training our ears to
hear spotted owls, but we heard a lot of other animals. There were at least six
other species of owls in our forest. It is really not all that difficult to
differentiate the calls of other owls from a spotted owl. We noted them in our
report, but they were not why we were there. We heard other strange noises in
the woods. When you hear elks calling in the middle of the night in the forest
it sounds like humpback whales. I’m not kidding. Frogs can be very annoying
when they set up a chorus and try to outvoice each other while you are trying
to listen for a faint hoot. We also heard crickets, night hawks, coyotes and
other unidentified rumblings through the brush. We didn’t worry too much about
the coyotes unless they were close.
We heard other sounds in the forest at night. The
burbling of nearby creeks. The wind whispering through the trees. In some
cases, it wasn’t whispering but shouting. If the wind was too loud, we had to
call it a night. Everything we were doing was dependent on our ability to hear
the owls, so our auditory experience in the forest was of great consequence. When
we weren’t hooting, we tried to remain as quiet as possible.
We got used to the natural background sounds of the
forest. But there was one place that had no sound. One station we visited was
always eerily silent. Have you ever been in a cave and
reached a point where there was no light, where you turned off the flashlight
and you literally could not see your hand in front of your face. Yeah, it was
like that, except with the absence of sound rather than light. No animal
sounds, no wind, no water sounds, not so much as two blades of grass rubbing
together. It felt as if the sound of your very breaths were being siphoned off
into a black hole. It wasn’t just quiet, it was the complete absence of sound,
the impossibility of sound. It felt like we were enclosed in a casket. There
was just a feeling of wrongness, like ‘does all the wildlife know something
that we don’t?’ At one point our radio squawked and my partner and I both about
jumped out of our skins. Then we laughed about it, but it was a timid,
uncomfortable laugh.
We had to visit these same set of stations three
times, and since it was a large area, we were covering, we decided to split up
for some of the nights. My partner would do one side of the area while I
visited the stations on the other. We traded sides so we each got the side with
the spooky silent station once. The time when I was alone at the silent
station by myself were the longest ten minutes of my life. Pitch black in both
sight and sound, it was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. The worst
part was that during that eerie silence I had to hoot. Loudly. It felt like jumping
on someone’s haunted grave.
The question is, why was this place so stiflingly
quiet? When we were setting these stations up in the daylight, I don’t remember
noting anything remarkable about the site. One would assume there is terrain
that affects it, like perhaps it is at the end of a side canyon whose walls
block sound from three directions. Maybe. But why no wildlife sounds? I could
always put it down to bad juju. No matter how I laugh that off, it is the
conclusion the emotional part of my brain wants to go back to. It was just a
place that felt wrong. Anyway, we survived. No boogey man jumped out to get us.
Still, it makes you wonder.
Silent
world
Broken
ambience
I
listen
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