Recently I heard a talk from Andrew Skeoch about his field recordings.
It was a thoughtful presentation that opened with audio he’d captured of the dawn chorus of birds in Victorian bushland.
Andrew shared a spectrogram with the birdcalls that showed their frequencies and then identified specific bird species to discuss their evolution and how this shaped their communications.
A cuckoo, for example, had a deeper call to reach other cuckoos as they were more geographically isolated species.
Other species engaged in a call and response that saw their birdsongs adapt to new melodies, which reflected my own recent experiences whistling with Pied Butcherbirds.
He spoke on the way some sounds will evade detection, while others include transients that help identify the location of the bird.
As the presentation neared the conclusion, Andrew reflected on the subjective experience of time to consider how different species in the landscape operate in different speeds.
He speculated that dragonflies, for example, live at a pace over a hundred times faster than humans.
To illustrate his point he slowed down the birdcall (but maintained pitch) of a small bird to demonstrate how more emotive their sequence sounded when we could identify the micro-phrases that constituted it.
The broader argument of his presentation, Andrew explained, was to help people recognise their place within the environment and he said there were many more observations with audio files to hear in the book he was promoting.
As he ended Andrew played the recording again and this seemed magic the way it illustrated how much we'd learned since first hearing it.
I really enjoyed hearing his perspective and am grateful for the Murrumbidgee Field Naturalists for inviting Andrew to visit Leeton.
