Listening with the Ears of Birds

At the moment,  the world does not seem to be in a place of listening.  We are all in a rush to make our voices heard. Everyone is rushing to say something new, but we can not hear because we are all talking over each other.

Nature interrupts us gently. We all love to hear birds sing and some of us can even identify a bird by its particular song. I know a few songs, but I know birdwatchers who can distinguish 100’s of songs and their respective birds.

But birds have a gift that is even more miraculous.  It’s their ears. They can pick up vibrations of the earth and wind from hundreds of miles away.  In April 2014, Scientists got unexpected proof of this while conducting an unrelated experiment involving golden-winged warblers in Tennessee. The team was studying if these warblers, which weigh the same as four dimes, could carry half-gram Geo-locators over long distances. Many  of these golden-winged warblers had just finished a 1,500-mile migration to Tennessee. After retrieving data from five of the 20 tagged birds, the team noticed the birds were no where near the path they expected. They had suddenly flown south on a 900-mile exodus to Florida and Cuba.

Two days later the reason for their sudden change of course became clear. At the time the birds changed course, there was a massive thunderstorm 200 hundred miles away which unleashed a series of tornadoes that tore through the central and southern United States. The twisters decimated homes and buildings, causing massive damage across 17 states. Huge tornado-spewing storms produce infra-sound, or noises at frequencies below 20 hertz that travel for thousands of miles, according to researchers. That sound, which is too low for humans to hear, travels at a frequency that birds can detect. Their keen sense of hearing alerted them to the incoming natural disaster and they flew an “emergency evacuation.”
What vibrations are birds hearing now around the world? Perhaps we do not have the hearing capacity of birds, but we can use our gifts of sight and hearing to understand the world around us and our fellow creatures.