That book changed me.

It told the story of a man who turned his back on London and the rat race, and chose wilderness instead. He found sanctuary in Scotland, at Camusfearna, where he lived with an otter named Mij. More than a story about an animal, it was a story about escape, solitude, and choosing a life shaped by nature.

That book planted a seed. It introduced me to the idea that wild places matter, that silence heals, and that connection with other species can define who we become.

I’ve carried a deep emotional bond with Scotland ever since. I recorded there for many years and fell in love with its landscapes, weather, and uncompromising beauty.

In 1989, while living in Blair Atholl, Perthshire, I met Hamish Pelham Burn. We walked the glens together with our dogs. My yellow Labrador was called Mij, named after the otter. When Hamish asked why, I told him about the book. He smiled and said Gavin Maxwell had been a close friend of his.

Hamish later took me to Camusfearna.
That was 32 years ago.

In 2025, I returned there with our film crew. The access felt different, the trees had grown thick, but the landscape was instantly recognisable. When I saw the old white house near the cairn where Gavin Maxwell is remembered, everything came rushing back.

Camusfearna sits just beyond Glenelg, reached by a narrow, primitive road. This time, snow was falling. The atmosphere was unchanged. My heart raced as I approached the cairn, and memory flooded in. The boy. The book. The life that followed.

When I leave this world, my ashes will be scattered here.

Some places never let you go.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

Use headphones to hear the low frequencies

Deep in the forest at Finca Austria in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, a sound rolled through the trees so low it was almost subliminal. A soft, booming pulse that you don’t so much hear as feel. It stopped me in my tracks. That sound was the giveaway.

The Great Curassow.

A bird once common across tropical forests, now eliminated from much of its range by hunting. These days, you’re lucky to encounter one at all, unless you’re deep inside protected parks or truly remote places. They usually walk the forest floor, calm and deliberate, sometimes feeding in trees. The males often sing from high in the canopy, releasing that extraordinary low-pitched boom that feels older than language.

I stayed still. I didn’t need to see it.
The forest told me everything.

Moments like this are why I record sound. Because long before a species disappears from sight, it disappears from the soundscape. And when you hear a voice like this still holding on, it matters.

Some encounters are meant for the ears, not the eyes.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

Most people think night is silent.

It isn’t.

It’s just happening beyond our hearing.

In this podcast, you’ll hear strange clicking sounds that don’t belong to birds or crickets. Those sounds were captured using a bat detector, a piece of equipment that converts ultrasonic frequencies into sounds we can hear.

What you’re listening to is an ancient conversation between bats and moths.

Bats hunt by sound, throwing pulses into the darkness and reading the echoes as a map of the night. Some moths have evolved a remarkable defense. They produce rapid ultrasonic clicks that interfere with that sonar, confusing the bat just long enough to escape.

It’s not singing.
It’s survival.

We don’t hear this world with our own ears, but it’s there every night above our heads, shaping who lives until morning.

When I listen to these recordings, I’m reminded how much of nature exists just beyond us, and how fragile these hidden soundscapes really are.

Have a listen.

There’s far more going on in the dark than we ever imagined.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

(apologies for the sound of my voice)

I didn’t find these birds with my eyes.
I found them by standing still long enough for the forest to trust me.

From Costa Rica to Panama, Mexico, Peru, and deep into the Amazon, I recorded five antbirds living low in the understory, following army ants, waiting patiently for the forest to provide. Their voices are small, intimate, easily lost beneath chainsaws, roads, and noise.

These are not loud birds.
They don’t compete.
They whisper.

And that’s the problem.

When the forest goes quiet, birds like these disappear first, long before most people even realise they were there. Every recording I make now feels fragile, like holding a breath that may never return.

Listen carefully to the quiet voices.
They are telling us something we can’t afford to ignore.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

If you have ever been lucky enough to witness a prairie chicken lek, you will never forget it.

To me, it feels like a Friday night pub back in the UK.

All the lads are already there.
Standing around.
Waiting.

They puff themselves up, stamp their feet, and boom out these extraordinary sounds, doing everything they can to impress.
Pure confidence.
Pure theatre.

Then the females arrive, and suddenly it all matters.

Each male is saying the same thing.
Pick me.

I have spent hours lying in the prairie, completely transfixed, recording this ancient ritual.
Watching the light rise.
Listening as the land comes alive with sound.

This is not noise.
This is communication.
This is survival.

Close your eyes and imagine those deep gobbles and low booms rolling across the open grasslands.

This is the voice of the prairie.
This is the story of the Greater Prairie-Chicken.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

When I was about eight years old, I stood in a science museum staring up at a hologram of the Irish elk. One word sat beneath it: Extinct.
I asked my stepdad what it meant.
He said, “It’s gone forever.”

At that age, I honestly thought if something was gone, you could just buy another one in a shop.
Then I saw a picture of the dodo with the same label, and something in me shifted.

As I grew older, and especially as a wildlife sound recordist, the meaning of extinction sank deeper. I realised it isn’t only about species disappearing—it can also be the disappearance of entire sound worlds.

There was a time when Sundays were quiet.
Shops closed, traffic slowed, and the world actually rested.
Even towns felt like sanctuaries.
Birdsong carried, wind moved without competition, and nature had a chance to be heard.

Those Sundays are gone.
And in a way, that quiet has become another subtle extinction.

I often say that two-thirds of my archive is now effectively extinct—not because the animals are all gone, but because the conditions that shaped those recordings no longer exist. More people, more roads, more planes, more machinery, more intrusion into places that were once pristine.

You can’t record today the way I could 30, 40, 50 years ago.
Those clean dawn choruses, those insect nights without a highway’s hum—they have vanished.

This is its own form of extinction.
A slow, creeping one.
The extinction of quiet.

All we have left are the recordings.

I’ve spent my life recording wildlife, listening to the world in a way hunters never will. And I’ve also infiltrated the Safari Club International conference five times—rooms I was never meant to walk into.

Inside, trophy hunting isn’t sold as “conservation.”
It’s sold like a shopping spree.

Booths offering “guaranteed tusker,” “exportable lion,” “aged-out leopard.” Price tags instead of respect. Hunters bragging about killing old elephants because they were “on their last molars,” as if that excuses pulling a trigger.

Not once did I hear anyone talk about the animal’s role in its family, its ecosystem, or its place in the world. Just money, calibers, and inches of horn.

I’ve watched elephants grieve. I’ve heard ecosystems fall silent when a predator disappears. I know what’s really lost.

Trophy hunting isn’t conservation.
It’s ego wearing camouflage.

And once you’ve stood in both worlds—the wild, where life is sacred, and the convention halls where life is priced—you never confuse them again.

#bantrophyhunting #thelisteningplanet

Every summer, a vast “dead zone” forms where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico — a place where oxygen levels drop so low that marine life simply can’t survive. It’s one of the largest in the world, caused by nutrient runoff from farms and industry thousands of miles upstream. This isn’t just a Gulf problem — it’s a reflection of how our actions ripple far beyond where we live. Fertilizers, waste, and chemicals wash into rivers, then into the sea, turning once-living waters into lifeless silence. We have the power to change this. Cleaner farming, wiser consumption, and accountability can bring life back to these waters.

#TheListeningPlanet #DeadZone #MississippiRiver #GulfOfMexico #Environment #SoundOfSilence

www.thelisteningplanet.com

When I was born in 1955, there were just over three billion people on the planet.
I began recording at the age of eleven, when the world still had long stretches of silence — real silence — the kind that carried the wingbeat of a pigeon or the distant bark of a fox across open fields. Back then, I hardly ever saw a plane in the skies above my neighborhood. Motorways were few, and the roads that linked cities were narrow and quiet. The nights were dark, the air was still, and the earth still breathed on its own terms.

As the years went on, those quiet places began to vanish.
New motorways cut through countryside I once recorded in. Where I’d captured skylarks rising over meadows, the hum of engines now filled the air. Even in the most remote places — deserts, tundra, deep forests — the human footprint became unavoidable. A cargo plane would drone over a rainforest canopy. A jet would slice through an Arctic dawn. The faraway rumble of highways would travel for miles, carried by the wind.

Every decade, the world grew louder.
Each time I returned to a site I had once recorded, something had changed — not just in the soundscape, but in life itself. The dawn chorus that used to burst with dozens of bird species now came from only a handful. Insects that once hummed and buzzed through summer air were gone, and with them the frogs, swallows, and bats that relied on them. Silence no longer felt peaceful; it felt hollow, emptied of voices.

The same machines that gave us convenience — the cars, planes, leaf blowers, chainsaws, generators — have slowly erased the subtle harmonies of the natural world. These noises are now woven into almost every recording I make. To find even a few seconds of pure, undisturbed nature takes immense patience, often heartbreak. I’ve stood in pristine forests, waiting for hours, only for a distant aircraft to bleed across the spectrum, flattening everything it touches.

We used to think of progress as movement — faster transport, bigger cities, more production.
But every gain in noise and speed has cost us something irreplaceable: the freedom of nature to speak. The orchestra of wild voices that once defined the Earth is being drowned out by our own.

When I listen back to my earliest recordings — the blackbird from my childhood garden, the whisper of reeds on a still morning — I realize they’re not just sounds; they’re memories of a planet that once had room for quiet.
And that quiet was life itself.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

Dear friends,

I’ve just released a new episode of The Listening Planet—and it’s a very personal one.
It’s about the bird that most likely introduced me to nature recording: the blackbird.

As a child, I would lie hidden in the bracken and listen. The blackbird’s alarm call taught me that something—or someone—had entered the woods. Its song, rich and flute-like, became the soundtrack to countless dawn choruses I recorded across the British Isles. The blackbird was my teacher, my companion, and my guide into the natural world.

But today, the blackbird is in trouble.
A mosquito-borne disease called Usutu virus has been spreading across Europe and the UK since 2020. In places like London, blackbird numbers have dropped by 40% in just five years. Add to this the sun-baked, wormless soils of Britain’s driest spring on record, and the pressure on this once-abundant bird is immense.

The British Trust for Ornithology has launched a national survey—Blackbirds in Gardens—asking the public to log sightings from April through September. It’s a simple act: spot a blackbird, record it, and you’re helping science track the disease and protect the species.

🎧 In this episode, I share my memories of how the blackbird shaped me, my recordings of their songs, and why now—more than ever—we must pay attention.

👉 [Listen to the episode here]
👉 [Take part in the survey here] https://www.devonlive.com/news/uk-world-news/anyone-blackbirds-asked-immediately-help-10462592

The blackbird taught me to listen.
Now it’s our turn to listen to it—and act.

Thank you, as always, for supporting me and The Listening Planet. Your support allows me to keep documenting these fragile voices and sharing their stories with the world.

With gratitude,
Martyn 🌍🎙️