Field Notes—

Peace, Quiet, And The Bliss Of Ignorance

By Curtiss Clark

It is remarkable how much sound is associated with our notions of peace and quiet. Whether we sit in the shade of a palm tree on a deserted island, or on a sunny rock in the middle of a forest, or just slouch in a chair on our own back porch, natural sounds massage the hard knots out of our daily experience. Peace isn’t really quiet at all. When you think of it, is there anything quite so unnerving as total and absolute silence?

Perhaps the silence we seek, then, in our quest for peace and quiet is the cognitive hush that comes in those rare moments when the incessant clatter of our own thinking stops to listen to something outside of ourselves. Natural sounds always rock the cradle of my own relaxation: waves on a beach, wind in the trees, and birds — always the birds. For me, these sounds carry no messages, need no interpretation, and require no response, which can be quite a relief. They are nothing more than quiet sensations of the moment, passing manifestations of an untethered present. My ignorance is bliss.

And it is ignorance. There are few natural sounds that are not fully freighted with information about the past, present, and future for those sensate creatures who have learned the language of nature’s aural articulations. Even the pampered pets that loaf around our house in a supersated state have a fluency in the language of random sounds that I can only guess at. Midsnooze, their ears pivot and pirouette, picking up information out of thin air about the doings of proximate bugs, rodents, mail carriers, and the occasional ghost. And this is just interspecies information. The signal goes to hi-def when species are trading sounds with their own kind.

Take, for example, that long, languorous two-note bee-bay song of the male black-capped chickadee now playing near you. It may produce deep relaxation in me sufficient to launch a midafternoon nap, but to another male chickadee it is a warning of territorial boundaries to be ignored at one’s own peril.

Not much gets by the curious and alert chickadees, even on the laziest of afternoons. They are usually the first to find new food sources and the first to notice threats, which is why so many small perching birds tend to go where the chickadees go. Five years ago researchers from the University of Montana discovered that their namesake alarm call — chick-a-dee-dee-dee — conveys some very specific information about predators in the neighborhood. (I’ve heard the call in response to our barking coon hound mutt, and it sounds pretty much like laughing to me.)

The scientists noticed that these chick-a-dee calls varied depending upon the type of predator threat. They describe them as “mobbing calls” because they result in a flocking defense or “mob” that gives predators pause as they consider pressing an attack. The call variant associated with impending predation by the small pygmy owl, for example, brought a more intense mobbing response than the call associated with a great horned owl. While the latter is bigger and looks more fearsome to us, the smaller owl poses the greater threat to small birds because of its maneuverability. Raptor body size and wingspan are a good predictor of risk for chickadees.

Once an unwelcome raptor leaves its perch and takes to the wing, according to the researchers, the chickadee raises the alert level, abandoning the detailed chick-a-dee report in favor of a more urgent and to-the-point high-pitched seet call, which I suppose loosely translates to “Everybody duck!”

And everybody ducks — even non-chickadees — maybe even ducks themselves. Well, nuthatches, anyway. These same researchers conducted subsequent experiments that showed that eavesdropping red-breasted nuthatches could understand the subtle variations about threat levels in the chickadees mobbing calls and responded appropriately to counter that threat.

Somewhere along the line, they learned not to be seduced by my ignorance-is-bliss version of peace and quiet, known more commonly among small birds as sudden death. And, sadly, I am learning that a little bit of knowledge can ruin a good nap.

(This and more than 65 other Field Notes essays are available at www. field-notebook .com.)