Writing Initiatives

Writing desks are often perched against windows, inviting us into a state of reverie from staring into an endless sky. Another element that lends an almost spiritual orientation to our thoughts is the sound of birds chirping, a sound that is taken for granted but the absence of which can be stark. In the 1960s, ecologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring evocatively spoke of the terrifying silence of a landscape devoid of birdsong. Using a recording made the morning after the cyclone Amphan made landfall in West Bengal on 20 May 2020, I explore the idea that birds respond to their immediate semiotic context through birdsong—a language of urgency that holds important lessons for planetary futures. I suggest that this avian orchestra can be a barometer for ecological health as well as a call to reflect on migration, displacement, reorientation, and the vicissitudes of anthropogenic global change.

I think of birdsong as a framework for understanding avian materialities that are reflective of our relationship with the natural world. This framework, I propose, can be used to reflect on the sonic ecologies of Bengal after Amphan, a climatic event that was indicative of an increasingly warming world. Can sonic deterritorialisation hold cues towards reimagining an age of global migration? Using the avian orchestra on the morning after Amphan as a playground for future imaginings, I draw our attention to nature’s indicators that are both warnings and celebrations of the complex intermeshing of life processes. This is about uncovering the story of an avian soundscape and allowing for the opportunity to be surprised, even astonished, at the interconnections between humans and other biological organisms.

The work of musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause tells us that animals claim their frequency in the sonic spectrum. Figuring as warning signals, mating calls, or threats to territory, this multitudinous simultaneity of sounds in different registers and intensities produces a “biophony” that Krause defines as “sounds emerging from nonhuman, non-domestic biological sources”[i]. Biophony carries information produced through millions of years of evolution to create a species call that is a survival mechanism as well as a marker for behaviour recognition, capable of indicating such things as food availability and danger.

The idea that animal sounds, coexisting in a dense ecosystem, can be mapped onto different registers and pitches to establish a network of communication with other creatures of their species (be it for warnings or information about food and water) through the forging of a “sonic civility”[ii], was proposed in Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra (2012). Krause reiterates the sacrality of these sounds in that they allow life to exist. Human activity, industrialisation, deforestation, technification, the drone of airplanes, and the whine of engines interfere with the syncing of different creature sounds (what Krause refers to as their synchronicity), contributing to long-term impacts on their habitats, migration routes, and breeding habits.

Bird populations across the globe are plummeting, with State of the World’s Birds Report 2022 stating the decline of 48 per cent of extant bird species. A 2020 study[iii] notes that a combination of urbanisation, deforestation, radiation, and use of pesticides has resulted in the tragic decline of the house sparrow in different parts of India. The imbricated and parallel processes of urban habitats intruding into natural ones and the virtual manufacturing of geophonic sounds[iv]—like in Rainymood.com or YouTube videos of flowing water serving as an ersatz substitute for a ‘natural’ experience—points to the multiple temporalities of habitation and the insatiable human need to conquer the environment. For Krause, “humans… were drawn to geophonic voices because they contained fundamental messages: those of food, a sense of place, and a spiritual connection”[v]. Now, the calm that was traditionally produced through communion with nature is replicated and directed towards work, meditation, study, or sleep. The sonification of the natural environment allows us to ‘bring the forest home’ as a token of natural plenitude, like collecting pinecones or seashells, even as our alienation from nature increases. 

The idea that the pandemic momentarily stalled the effects of climate change across the world was challenged by the super cyclone Amphan in Odisha and West Bengal. The fact that a cyclone of this scale was an outcome of global warming, as reported by climate scientists[vi], made all forms of life precarious. While montages of devastation filled our minds and screens, less was said about Amphan’s impact on the state’s avifauna. The morning after the devastation, I heard an avian orchestra come to life from a high-rise in Ballygunge, Kolkata. The density of the bird population there was already high because of a green stretch in the government housing estate opposite our building. Parrots were found in profusion, as well as kites, pigeons, crows, stonechats, warblers, and robins, all maintaining an acoustic harmony with their surroundings. That day, though, the sounds were varied, heterogeneous, the common chorus broken through a sonority of guest appearances.