There was a pond my brother took me to when I was little, it was about a mile or so from my house,It was a magical place.
If you scooped a jam jar into the water there would be a world of critters swimming around.
Daphnia, insect lava, Water boatmen, Tadpoles..
it was a fascinating world and one that had me mesmerized for many years.
When we moved to a new location a few miles away, I was still able to walk the distance to the pond, but this time you would pass through cornfields, bluebell woods to get to it.
There were very few houses and cars then.
Fields went for miles into the distance and kids played without the worry of being accosted.
My pond was the foundation for who I am today.
The world’s population was half of what it is now.
As I grew older, I learnt to record these sounds and understand a new language.
Communication between animals was critical for them to survive.
I used to sit very quietly in my magical places and record their languages.
Just recently, I visited a wetlands here in Florida. Visually it looked amazing, Large bodies of water, healthy reed beds, but something was not right.
I decided to come back later in the day to see if there were any roosting birds that used the wetlands as a safe haven at dusk.
To my joy, about a thousand red-winged blackbirds and grackles flew in from multiple directions and hunkered down in the reeds.
The sounds of their calls were loud but the infrastructure that surrounded the wetlands was louder.
It was very obvious that these birds were having to call louder to be heard above the din of the human noises.
It has been proven that some birds have had to change their frequencies to be heard in some places.
As our world gets bigger, the natural world decreases. Valuable habitat is diminishing rapidly.
These wetlands are becoming less as we take the land to build more roads and houses.
Somewhere back in the uk where I grew up with my pond, is now a housing estate.
The fields have given way to roads and houses and where my pond was now sits a row of buildings.
I’ve tried so hard to come to terms with what I’ve seen and recorded in my life but at times it brings me great heartache.
Watching nature decline is like seeing your child abused.
So many people and disconnected and have no real idea what we are losing.
The environment is not important in most people’s minds
I can’t record like I used to because there is always some intrusion from man.
How do we reverse this trend?
To live in a world like now is very difficult for someone like myself because I know what it was like before.
People born into today know no better so it’s normal to them.
I hope my recordings of years gone by will one day be used as a template going forward.
The listening planet is 55 years of audio history.
www.thelisteningplanet.com
