Sounds cape

An emerging science is making waves in the world of conservation. Discover the exciting potential of ecoacoustics.

- ANDREW GRIFFITHS

OLLIE METCALF FIRST stumbled upon the potential power of sound when surveying birds on windfarms in the UK. So often, his trips would end in frustration. d spend hours surveying without ever seeing much, then miss a load when I wasn’t there,” he recalls.

Metcalf knew there had to be a better way. Then, it struck him. Birds communicate with sound, so why not listen rather than watch? As humans, we are primarily focused on vision, and we think that is how we should perceive the world,” he says. But birds want to be detected by sound.”

This realisation subsequently guided Metcalf through two research degrees, where he used sound to monitor the reintroduction of the hihi bird in New Zealand, and to analyse Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.

Metcalf is now a research associate at Manchester Metropolitan University, having completed his PhD. His field is ecoacoustics, the science of interpreting animal sounds to learn about the status of their ecosystems. It’s a young discipline perhaps just 10 years old and an exciting time to be involved.

People have been recording animal sound since the equipment to make it possible was invented. These tended to be recordings of individuals, but people soon began to think that the bigger picture was being missed within the whole cacophony of an ecosystem. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould described this as the invisibility of larger contexts caused by too much focus upon single items, otherwise known as missing the forest through the trees”.