What is silence?

For most people it means peace and quiet. But for me, silence is something very different. It is not the absence of sound, but the absence of life’s voices — the birds, the insects, the wild chorus we call biophony.

True silence only exists in an anechoic chamber. What I seek instead is tranquility. A place where the Earth itself speaks.

The rain falling through leaves.
The wind moving through trees.
The ocean breathing against the shore.
The ancient voice of the planet.

And yet, I have seen people leave wild places because it is “too quiet.” Some of us have forgotten how to listen. Some of us fear tranquility.

Sound is not just something we hear. It is something we feel. It is the pulse of the Earth itself.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

I want to share a small story with you.

Many years ago, standing beside a quiet pond in the Wye Valley, I recorded my first reed warbler. A tiny bird hidden deep in the reeds, yet its voice filled the entire landscape with an endless cascade of buzzes, clicks, and song. I remember my tape running out while the bird continued, tireless, unstoppable. Even then, I knew I was witnessing something special.

Moments like that shaped my life. They are why I have dedicated over half a century to capturing the voices of the natural world. But these moments only continue because of you.

Your support here does more than help fund recordings. You help preserve fragile soundscapes, document species that may one day fall silent, and ensure that future generations can still hear the wild places of this planet.

Every recording I share, every story I tell, exists because you believe this work matters.

From my heart, thank you for walking this journey with me.

Martyn

www.thelisteningplanet.com

I live in the United States now — in Florida — though for more than twenty years Washington State was my home.

The human voices around me carry a different accent from my British one, yet in the natural world, especially in bird song, I often hear echoes of where I came from.

When I first arrived in America, it felt as though I had to learn a new language of sound. But it was not entirely unfamiliar — more like Spanish and Italian: different, yet sharing rhythms and tones that hint at a common origin.

Take the firecrest of Europe and the kinglets here in North America. They are close relatives, belonging to the same family, and their high, delicate songs are remarkably alike. Hearing a kinglet in the forests of Washington instantly reminded me of the firecrest back home — a tiny voice bridging continents.

Even birds that share the same name can tell very different stories. In Britain, our robin is a small bird with a gentle, delicate voice. The American robin, however, is something quite different. Despite the name, it is actually a thrush — larger, richer in tone, and far closer in sound to the thrushes of Europe.

To my ears, the song of the American robin often recalls the Eurasian blackbird. If you were to hear a dawn chorus recording without context — especially from a distance — you might easily mistake one for the other, at least for a moment.

Some birds, of course, truly share the same voice on both sides of the Atlantic. The starling in America is the European starling — the very same species. Introduced to North America in the late nineteenth century, inspired by references in Shakespeare’s plays, their whistles, clicks, and extraordinary mimicry sound just as they do back in Britain.

Other comparisons reveal both similarity and difference. The skylark of Britain and the horned lark of North America share the same open landscapes, yet their songs differ greatly. The Eurasian skylark pours out a continuous stream of music as it climbs high into the sky, while the horned lark offers a shorter, simpler song. And yet both evoke the same sense of space, freedom, and wildness.

Then there is the house finch of North America and the chaffinch of Europe. Though not closely related, both fill gardens and woodlands with lively, musical phrases that feel somehow familiar across continents.

If you ever have the chance to listen to bird song from both sides of the Atlantic, you may understand what I mean. Different landscapes, different voices — yet deeply connected.

And wherever you are, listening to birds remains one of the great privileges of being alive.

Thank you as always for your support xx

www.thelisteningplanet.com

I’ve realised over the years that you have to be a certain kind of person to do what I’ve done most of my life.

I can sit for hours, barely moving, listening. Not thinking. Just being. People often ask what’s going through my head and never quite believe me when I say “nothing” — but that’s the truth. It’s a kind of meditation.

I think of my mind as having boxes. A reading box. A gardening box. An odd-jobs box. I only open one at a time. But my favourite box of all is the empty one. That’s the box I open when I’m recording.

In a world that never stops making noise, we’ve forgotten how therapeutic it is to be quiet and to listen. When you do, nature reveals far more than she ever does to the restless observer. Life carries on around you, unbothered — until we arrive and make a din again.

Silence isn’t absence.
It’s presence.

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In the cloud forests of Costa Rica, some voices don’t give themselves up easily.

This little bird, the Scaled Antpitta, speaks in low, trembling notes that melt into the forest rather than rise above it. When I first heard it, I thought it was an owl. Only later did I learn I’d been listening to one of the most elusive voices of the forest floor.

I was lucky enough to record it near the volcanic slopes of Arenal. I only caught a glimpse of the bird itself — a fleeting moment — but its voice stayed with me.

That’s why I do this work.

To everyone who supports me here, and especially to those of you on Patreon, thank you. Your backing allows me to keep recording, documenting, and preserving these fragile soundscapes while they still exist. You’re not just supporting a project — you’re helping protect voices that might otherwise disappear into silence.

I’m deeply grateful.
Martyn 🎧🌿

www.thelisteningplanet.com

Sometimes I ask people to listen… to silence.

That silence could be the Irish elk.
That silence could be the dodo.

Extinction doesn’t just remove an animal. It removes a voice from the planet forever.

During my lifetime, I’ve recorded species whose sounds no longer exist in the wild. The Panamanian golden frog. The northern white rhino. Voices gone within a single generation.

Wildlife populations have dropped by 74% in my lifetime. North America has lost 3 billion birds since 1970.

After nearly 60 years recording nature, two thirds of the soundscapes in my archive no longer exist as they once did.

Silence in nature is not peaceful.

Silence is absence.
Silence is warning.
Silence is forever.

www.thelisteningplanet

Standing among an elephant seal colony is like stepping into another language.

If a human made these sounds—deep belches, coughing roars, wet grunts—we’d probably turn away in embarrassment. On a Patagonian beach, they are the soundtrack of life itself.

This is Península Valdés, on the coast of Argentina, the only place on a continental mainland where southern elephant seals come ashore in vast numbers to breed. Each year, tens of thousands arrive between August and March. The beaches fill with immense males staking out territory, pregnant females giving birth within days of landing, and newborn pups learning the world through sound before anything else.

I spent hours here recording, trying to isolate individual voices in the chaos. Not easy. The air is thick with sneezes, bellows, coughing, and breath. One male stayed close to a female and her pup, repeatedly vocalising—low, forceful warnings to anything that came too near. Protection, dominance, presence—all expressed through sound.

To us it may seem crude. Out here, it’s communication. Fat, breath, muscle, instinct—turned into voice.

This is what a healthy, functioning wild place sounds like.

Thank you Patreons x

www.thelisteningplanet.com

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I first began recording in Scotland in 1975, the same year the white-tailed eagle began its slow return.

Before that, the bird had been hunted, poisoned and persecuted until it vanished from our skies. Its disappearance was not an accident of nature, but a choice made by people, one shot, one stolen egg, one poisoned carcass at a time. By the early twentieth century, the white-tailed eagle was gone.

I didn’t see one on the Isle of Rùm during my early visits, but by 1978 they were there. I remember sitting quietly near a nest, microphones set, watching adults carry fish back to their young, hearing those high, piercing calls once again echoing across the Inner Hebrides. It was worth every second of waiting. Seeing them ride the thermals felt like witnessing something being put back where it belonged.

Today there are around 200 breeding pairs in Scotland. A conservation success, yes, but the story isn’t finished. These birds are still persecuted in some places, still unwelcome to those who haven’t learned to share the land.

In 2025, I saw them again while filming near Skye. Watching them soar, I was reminded that recovery is fragile. The return of the white-tailed eagle asks us a quiet question: if we can bring this back, what else might we still save, and what will we choose to lose?

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I have always believed that natural sound is one of the clearest barometers of the health of our planet.

When an ecosystem is thriving, you can hear it. The layers of birds, insects, frogs, mammals, wind, and water all exist in balance. Sound tells the truth long before statistics do.

When human made noise enters that space, the balance shifts.

As a young sound recordist, I could sit in the woods or by a stream for hours with little interruption. The only problem was how quickly my tapes filled up. What I captured then was abundant, complex, and alive.

Today, truly quiet places are rare. Wildlife populations have declined dramatically in my lifetime, and vast areas of wild land have been altered or fragmented. The skies are filled with constant aircraft noise, and the natural world now competes with leaf blowers, vehicles, boats, machinery, and an endless human hum.

Some birds now change their pitch just to be heard. In the oceans, increasing noise disrupts communication for whales and dolphins that rely on sound to survive.

There are very few places left untouched by us.

When I compare the soundscape of my childhood to what exists today, I understand why sitting undisturbed in nature once felt like such a gift. It is painful to witness the slow disappearance of something so fundamental.

Sound is not just something we hear. It is how the natural world speaks.

And we are losing the conversation.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

One bird, above all others, embodies that sense of planetary connection: the Arctic tern.

I have recorded Arctic terns in many places, including the Southern Hemisphere, but encountering them in Shetland feels especially profound. Here, they breed at the northern end of the world before embarking on a journey unlike any other.

The Arctic tern holds the record for the longest migration of any animal on Earth. Each year, it travels from its breeding grounds in the high north to the waters surrounding Antarctica, and then back again. Over the course of its lifetime, that distance adds up to the rough equivalent of flying to the Moon and back.

This is not poetic exaggeration. It is one of the most extraordinary biological feats on the planet.

Imagine a bird moving through shifting biomes: Arctic light, temperate seas, tropical waters, roaring Southern Ocean swells, and the frozen margins of the Antarctic ice. Imagine the sounds beneath its wings changing constantly, from quiet northern dawns to the restless breath of global oceans.

Now imagine following that journey through sound.

www.thelisteningplanet.com