Soundscapes: Listening to the Landscape. Reconnecting to the community of nature with our ears in addition to our eyes gives us a whole new perspective.
I really relate to this, as my hearing is my dominant sense, and my vision is not too hot. I often hear things before I see them, if I ever see them, and I’m an oral learner. I am a lot like your mother, although I have color vision and less myopia. I was just noticing this week that there are so few cicadas this year. They always come out the end of July here and stay till first frost. When I’m resting with my eyes closed, I can hear the doves with their flutey sounding wings, and the incessant chatter of the house finches, and the little goldfinches, and for the first time in a month, two crows. And the sound of the wind in the trees, and that lovely little thunderstorm that just rolled through…
Thank you for this, Kathryn! I can hear your soundscape, and I can also feel your delight in the recitation of the bird calls, the addition of the crows, the subtraction of cicadas, and that "lovely" thunderstorm. That last feels delightful to me too. :)
They're not native to this continent at all: they apparently jumped ship in Miami in the late 1960s or early 1970s and have spread rapidly across the continent, displacing mourning doves in many places. So if Merlin isn't up to date on where they are, it's not surprising. :)
Thank you, Susan. My auditory sense is less developed than my visual sense and yet I share the joy you expressed about our soundscapes. Your sharing of your growing-up days and your mom, as well as the airport installation, reminded me of a recent GARNA birding experience I had with Jacque Fisher. I am amazed at her ability to identify many birds by their song and her skill at imitating them. Your listening and noting activities would be brilliant in the elementary classroom. I appreciate your writing and essential understandings about terraphilia.
I think anytime we can move beyond vision and experience the community of the land through our other senses deepens our relationship with those lives. And how wonderful that you could go out with Jacque F and experience her ability to hear and converse with birds! She is amazing. You are welcome to pass the listening and noticing activities on to teachers, and thank you for the compliment. I've enjoyed working with schools and classes when I've had the opportunity. As Jacque knows, I particularly appreciate working with middle-schoolers, because I remember how confusing those years were for me. :)
I so relate to experiencing Nature through its soundscape. Being a musician, I find that the auditory experience is often what I enjoy most when out in natural places. When in loud cities, I find I can handle only a few days before I can feel my nerves beginning to whither. I could not imagine birding without my ear - it is the sense I use the most when birding. Thanks for a lovely piece.
I can understand how rich the soundscape is for a musician even though I am not one (I am more like my tone-deaf dad, though not as bad!). I also can relate to your comment about loud cities, I feel my entire nervous system begin to shut down from the overstimulation after a few days. I am so not a city person. Do you do bird walks for the kids at the school? I can imagine they would be fascinated by a musician's take on bird song, and might learn a lot from you.
My main contribution to the school’s students is singing for them, teaching them songs. I have done bird songs with them, differentiating between common residents -chickadees, nuthatches… they are sponges, soaking everything in.
Love this as I love all your pieces. This one speaks to my ears. Your previous letter I’ve linked in my newsletter. I hope it brings you new subscribers.
Thank you for this wonderful piece on sound. I know spring has arrived when the meadowlark bubbling sounds early outside my bedroom window and the red-winged blackbird's buzz arrives at the pond. I noticed several nights ago, that crickets were fiddling. That happens here when fall is in the air. Mourning doves have pitched their coo coo coo song most mornings all summer. Right now, smoke is strangulating everything.
Julie, what a lovely evocation of the seasons in your part of the world by the sounds of the birds and insects! I am glad you have those voices to listen to, and to keep your grounded in the cycle of the year. And I am very sorry that the smoke is so bad this late summer, with so many huge fires in your part of Idaho. Breathe carefully, and stay safe!
Thank you, Stephanie. I can picture you sinking into your breathing and listening, and hope that practice brings you calm amidst this liminal time. Blessings!
Listening to birds is one of my go-to grounding practices. If my mind is a little flighty when I wake up, like it was today, I go to my mat (one of the first things every morning), and instead of exercising I just lie there awhile and listen to the birds waking up. I love identifying each one, counting the doves, each from their different directions, noticing their differences, taking note of which outliers are vocal this morning. It's a precious wake-up time, letting my mind drift with the birds.
Priscilla, what a gorgeous grounding practice! I especially love that you can triangulate the different dove voices and that they are different enough that you can recognize individuals. That's how I feel about the plants I greet on my morning walking meditation: they are inviduals who I have come to know and recognize. That's a joy.
To clarify, I don't know the individuals on a persistent basis, just count them in the moment. Today the outlier species were maybe a house finch or house sparrow calling some alarms. Likely a cat! And the mynahs are ever present. But in August the dawn chorus is mostly zebra doves and spotted doves.
Ah, that makes sense. But still, what a wonderfully rich practice. Are any of those birds native, or are all from somewhere else? (I don't know Hawaii's bird fauna, I'm afraid, having never been there.) Not that native matters in this case--they are your familiar singers, regardless--I am just curious.
Here at the populated coast all the birds are exotic. The only native one now and then is a pueo (Hawaiian short-eared owl) hunting at dusk in the grassland next to us—and sometimes veering directly over our dinner table, usually right after someone makes a significant statement. (!!!) Always a blessing to catch a glimpse of one. There are native shorebirds at the wetland preserve a few miles away. But all the native forest-birds are up the mountain, confined to the shrunken native forest, and all of them are highly endangered. Here in our hood I think a lot about hybrid ecocommunities. About how these species from Asia and the Americas learned to live together. No one studies them, as far as I know, but it would be fascinating to do community ecology with them—how they adapted to one another. Do they interact? Do they read one another’s signals, the way members of a native ecocommunity do? No one knows.
Seeing the pueo must be like a visitation from the land! What an amazing experience. It's interesting that no none is studying the urban bird community, but I think when the native birds are in crisis, they get all of the attention. Also, urban community ecology is a relatively new field of study, so it's not necessarily that widespread.
Many an early morning I was out on the Jornada del Muerto, working on several projects on biocontrol for range management. On several occasions I was startled when the absolute calm was broken by coyotes calling to each other as they returned from the hunt.
Again I heard coyotes as they started on the night's hunt during my unsuccessful attempt to locate adults of the range caterpillar during their normal breeding season. I was in the Davis Mountains of Texas because there were several specimens from the area in the British Museum of Natural History. I set up generator-powered black light in a likely spot. As noted, the silence was again broken by coyotes calling to one another in the dark. The silhouette of McDonald Observatory was in the distance, barely visible in the fading light. After consulting with a company that regularly set up black lights in the mountains, I came to the conclusion that the localized population of range caterpillars was extinct, despite the abundance of their favorite food- blue grama grass.
However, the call of coyotes, the song dog of the west, was indelibly fixed in my mind.
Each of those vignettes from your fieldwork is so vivid, Dave. Despite the sadness of the second one, where you concluded that the population of range caterpillars in the Davis Mountains was extinct, the scene as you describe it is an evocative and beautiful. I'm glad that the song-dogs added to your fieldwork soundscape!
The local ranchers would be glad the range caterpillars were gone because these odd native giant silkworm moths compete with their cattle for forage. We did, however, find a probably original population in Chihuahua north of Ciudad Chihuahua that I was told did not exist!
I, too, am a bird-listener. I am completely satisfied with the hearing of a bird's song, with no need to actually see the bird. Ahhh, there's the field sparrows today. The lovely songs tell me all I need to know.
A few years ago I became enamored with the words "biophony" (sounds of life) and "geophony" (sounds of the earth). I love the all sounds of a place and its seasons. The crickets of fall sound entirely different than the crickets of spring or their winter silence.
Thanks for writing this piece. Thanks for being a fellow nature listener. And the meadowlark in the airport sounds beautiful. I certainly would have noticed!
Tricia, I am sure you would have noticed and appreciated the prairie soundscape at DIA while it lasted! It was fun to stand out of the way at the edge of the concourse and watch those people who did notice and when they recognized the prairie sounds. :)
I forgot about biophony and geophony--such great words--or I would have used them in this piece. I believe that when we turn to our non-dominant senses to understand the community of the land, we experience those relationships more deeply and fully. Vision is great, but it only gives us one part of the picture (to use a vision metaphor).
Blessings to you and your neighbors the field sparrows!
Working with the Deaf for so many years in American Sign Language ironically made me more attuned to listening. I would think about all the things they were unable to hear and thus appreciate my hearing even more. This year our garden has been a musical haven. I don't know if it is the abundant rains or my husband's careful planting, but this is the most alive our garden has ever been, from the chatter of insects to the buzzing of bees to the songbirds--even the more subtle sounds of the hummingbirds flitting between the Bird of Paradise to their feeding station, a sound one does not hear unless listening intently. I can thank the Deaf, as well as my many years of listening as a psychoanalyst, for developing my listening skills.
It's interesting, but I guess not surprising, that working with a population who cannot hear or who have impaired hearing gave you an increased attunement to listening. It makes sense in the same way that the lack of something makes us more aware of it, as if we become more sensitized by scarcity. And of course since your work literally involved listening as a practitioner, you would be more aware of that particular sense.
How lovely that your garden is a burgeoning soundscape this year! You have a flourishing of biophony, to use the word that Tricia Kyzer reminded us of. That's a gift, and I suspect is both because of the rains--rain is definitely the key ingredient for life here in the desert!--and your husband's plantings. Enjoy the sounds of life and liveliness!
I love this, soundscapes are so delicate and easily fractured by engine sounds and other low rumbling vibrations. I spend a lot of time immersing in my local woods soundscape. An aspect that I have noticed is how this is truly surround sound, 360 degrees, the tiniest chirp or rustle or wind can come from anywhere.
Thank you for sharing this important observation - hey! There it is again, a vision based word. I suppose I should rather say, I hear you.
"Surround sound" is a great way to describe that kind of immersion in natural soundscapes, and I am glad your local woods offers that experience. It's true that the sounds of human activity--especially mechanical activity from engines--pollutes natural soundscapes so easily. If only we took noise pollution more seriously!
And thanks for the chuckle about how prevalent our vision-based vocabulary is. Blessings!
Loved hearing the sandhill cranes. What a treat for me to see them in such a different landscape than here in Wisconsin where Aldo Leopold observed them. See with my ears. Listen with my eyes. Re-wiring my connections.
I do love sandhill cranes' voices! The cranes here are greater sandhill cranes, while the ones you and Aldo Leopold are/were familiar with are lesser sandhills. The difference is size--ours stand about six inches taller and weigh a few more pounds. But there are many fewer of the greater sandhills than your lesser ones. I think the whole Rocky Mountain flock of greater sandhills numbers just over 20,000 birds, while the lesser sandhills of the Great Plains and Midwest number around half a million birds.
And yes, rewiring neural connections. I love "See with my ears. Listen with my eyes." Exactly!
Thank you for this important reminder about listening to nature. Since moving out of a city 15 years ago, my listening skills and knowledge of my landscape is improved. I am not a great birder but I can identify many of the species that live alongside me. The app Merlin has been a wonderful tool to help me identify what I am hearing.
Sue, I am glad you are out where you can listen and be part of that landscape, and I would say if you can identify many of the birds that live around and along with you, you're a very good birder indeed. Merlin is a great help too. :)
I saw a news story on that effort and am delighted that National Parks and Conservation Association is championing protecting soundscapes (finally--it's taken a while for the idea to become compelling, I think). The Park Service has been recording natural soundscapes at all NPS places for a couple of decades, and even in that time, the deterioration is startling and sad.
Soundscapes are fascinating and visceral. The song of the cranes has always seemed a primal sound of music that has drifted down through the eons, as well as being heard in the present. The soundscape of the prairie is a favorite of mine. Others are: crickets, aspen leaves rustling, grasses in the wind, the wind herself, bird favorites: meadowlark, redwinged blackbird, bluebirds, hawks, killdeer, curlew, robins and wrens. The small sound of a horse's eye blinking is another lovely sound.
And right now outside my early morning window, a covey of two adult and a swarm of small quail, just big enough to fly scurry around. Hard to beat their cuteness!
Jenny, I agree about crane calls and how they seem to come from deep time, and appeal to we humans at the cellular level. And I love your list of favorite sounds, especially the less obvious ones, including a horse's eye blinking. I often put my ear to tree trunks to see if I can hear their circulation. Sometimes it seems that I can, though I'm not sure.
Re quail: the other day I watched a family of scaled quail cross the road near my house and counted 13 half-grown quail plus two adults. That's quite a brood, and as you say, their cuteness factor is off the charts. :)
I really relate to this, as my hearing is my dominant sense, and my vision is not too hot. I often hear things before I see them, if I ever see them, and I’m an oral learner. I am a lot like your mother, although I have color vision and less myopia. I was just noticing this week that there are so few cicadas this year. They always come out the end of July here and stay till first frost. When I’m resting with my eyes closed, I can hear the doves with their flutey sounding wings, and the incessant chatter of the house finches, and the little goldfinches, and for the first time in a month, two crows. And the sound of the wind in the trees, and that lovely little thunderstorm that just rolled through…
Thank you for this, Kathryn! I can hear your soundscape, and I can also feel your delight in the recitation of the bird calls, the addition of the crows, the subtraction of cicadas, and that "lovely" thunderstorm. That last feels delightful to me too. :)
AND we have had a pair of Eurasian collared doves all week which Merlyn helped me with. BTW, they don’t exist in South Dakota. Lol
They're not native to this continent at all: they apparently jumped ship in Miami in the late 1960s or early 1970s and have spread rapidly across the continent, displacing mourning doves in many places. So if Merlin isn't up to date on where they are, it's not surprising. :)
Thank you, Susan. My auditory sense is less developed than my visual sense and yet I share the joy you expressed about our soundscapes. Your sharing of your growing-up days and your mom, as well as the airport installation, reminded me of a recent GARNA birding experience I had with Jacque Fisher. I am amazed at her ability to identify many birds by their song and her skill at imitating them. Your listening and noting activities would be brilliant in the elementary classroom. I appreciate your writing and essential understandings about terraphilia.
I think anytime we can move beyond vision and experience the community of the land through our other senses deepens our relationship with those lives. And how wonderful that you could go out with Jacque F and experience her ability to hear and converse with birds! She is amazing. You are welcome to pass the listening and noticing activities on to teachers, and thank you for the compliment. I've enjoyed working with schools and classes when I've had the opportunity. As Jacque knows, I particularly appreciate working with middle-schoolers, because I remember how confusing those years were for me. :)
I so relate to experiencing Nature through its soundscape. Being a musician, I find that the auditory experience is often what I enjoy most when out in natural places. When in loud cities, I find I can handle only a few days before I can feel my nerves beginning to whither. I could not imagine birding without my ear - it is the sense I use the most when birding. Thanks for a lovely piece.
I can understand how rich the soundscape is for a musician even though I am not one (I am more like my tone-deaf dad, though not as bad!). I also can relate to your comment about loud cities, I feel my entire nervous system begin to shut down from the overstimulation after a few days. I am so not a city person. Do you do bird walks for the kids at the school? I can imagine they would be fascinated by a musician's take on bird song, and might learn a lot from you.
My main contribution to the school’s students is singing for them, teaching them songs. I have done bird songs with them, differentiating between common residents -chickadees, nuthatches… they are sponges, soaking everything in.
Love this as I love all your pieces. This one speaks to my ears. Your previous letter I’ve linked in my newsletter. I hope it brings you new subscribers.
Dear Jane, Thank you so much! Both for the compliment and for linking to my Substack in your newsletter. I am honored. Blessings to you!
Thank you for this wonderful piece on sound. I know spring has arrived when the meadowlark bubbling sounds early outside my bedroom window and the red-winged blackbird's buzz arrives at the pond. I noticed several nights ago, that crickets were fiddling. That happens here when fall is in the air. Mourning doves have pitched their coo coo coo song most mornings all summer. Right now, smoke is strangulating everything.
Julie, what a lovely evocation of the seasons in your part of the world by the sounds of the birds and insects! I am glad you have those voices to listen to, and to keep your grounded in the cycle of the year. And I am very sorry that the smoke is so bad this late summer, with so many huge fires in your part of Idaho. Breathe carefully, and stay safe!
Your piece reminds me to close my eyes, breathe deeply and listen intently. Thank you, Susan. You always uplift.
Thank you, Stephanie. I can picture you sinking into your breathing and listening, and hope that practice brings you calm amidst this liminal time. Blessings!
Listening to birds is one of my go-to grounding practices. If my mind is a little flighty when I wake up, like it was today, I go to my mat (one of the first things every morning), and instead of exercising I just lie there awhile and listen to the birds waking up. I love identifying each one, counting the doves, each from their different directions, noticing their differences, taking note of which outliers are vocal this morning. It's a precious wake-up time, letting my mind drift with the birds.
Priscilla, what a gorgeous grounding practice! I especially love that you can triangulate the different dove voices and that they are different enough that you can recognize individuals. That's how I feel about the plants I greet on my morning walking meditation: they are inviduals who I have come to know and recognize. That's a joy.
To clarify, I don't know the individuals on a persistent basis, just count them in the moment. Today the outlier species were maybe a house finch or house sparrow calling some alarms. Likely a cat! And the mynahs are ever present. But in August the dawn chorus is mostly zebra doves and spotted doves.
Ah, that makes sense. But still, what a wonderfully rich practice. Are any of those birds native, or are all from somewhere else? (I don't know Hawaii's bird fauna, I'm afraid, having never been there.) Not that native matters in this case--they are your familiar singers, regardless--I am just curious.
Here at the populated coast all the birds are exotic. The only native one now and then is a pueo (Hawaiian short-eared owl) hunting at dusk in the grassland next to us—and sometimes veering directly over our dinner table, usually right after someone makes a significant statement. (!!!) Always a blessing to catch a glimpse of one. There are native shorebirds at the wetland preserve a few miles away. But all the native forest-birds are up the mountain, confined to the shrunken native forest, and all of them are highly endangered. Here in our hood I think a lot about hybrid ecocommunities. About how these species from Asia and the Americas learned to live together. No one studies them, as far as I know, but it would be fascinating to do community ecology with them—how they adapted to one another. Do they interact? Do they read one another’s signals, the way members of a native ecocommunity do? No one knows.
Seeing the pueo must be like a visitation from the land! What an amazing experience. It's interesting that no none is studying the urban bird community, but I think when the native birds are in crisis, they get all of the attention. Also, urban community ecology is a relatively new field of study, so it's not necessarily that widespread.
Many an early morning I was out on the Jornada del Muerto, working on several projects on biocontrol for range management. On several occasions I was startled when the absolute calm was broken by coyotes calling to each other as they returned from the hunt.
Again I heard coyotes as they started on the night's hunt during my unsuccessful attempt to locate adults of the range caterpillar during their normal breeding season. I was in the Davis Mountains of Texas because there were several specimens from the area in the British Museum of Natural History. I set up generator-powered black light in a likely spot. As noted, the silence was again broken by coyotes calling to one another in the dark. The silhouette of McDonald Observatory was in the distance, barely visible in the fading light. After consulting with a company that regularly set up black lights in the mountains, I came to the conclusion that the localized population of range caterpillars was extinct, despite the abundance of their favorite food- blue grama grass.
However, the call of coyotes, the song dog of the west, was indelibly fixed in my mind.
Each of those vignettes from your fieldwork is so vivid, Dave. Despite the sadness of the second one, where you concluded that the population of range caterpillars in the Davis Mountains was extinct, the scene as you describe it is an evocative and beautiful. I'm glad that the song-dogs added to your fieldwork soundscape!
The local ranchers would be glad the range caterpillars were gone because these odd native giant silkworm moths compete with their cattle for forage. We did, however, find a probably original population in Chihuahua north of Ciudad Chihuahua that I was told did not exist!
I, too, am a bird-listener. I am completely satisfied with the hearing of a bird's song, with no need to actually see the bird. Ahhh, there's the field sparrows today. The lovely songs tell me all I need to know.
A few years ago I became enamored with the words "biophony" (sounds of life) and "geophony" (sounds of the earth). I love the all sounds of a place and its seasons. The crickets of fall sound entirely different than the crickets of spring or their winter silence.
Thanks for writing this piece. Thanks for being a fellow nature listener. And the meadowlark in the airport sounds beautiful. I certainly would have noticed!
Tricia, I am sure you would have noticed and appreciated the prairie soundscape at DIA while it lasted! It was fun to stand out of the way at the edge of the concourse and watch those people who did notice and when they recognized the prairie sounds. :)
I forgot about biophony and geophony--such great words--or I would have used them in this piece. I believe that when we turn to our non-dominant senses to understand the community of the land, we experience those relationships more deeply and fully. Vision is great, but it only gives us one part of the picture (to use a vision metaphor).
Blessings to you and your neighbors the field sparrows!
Working with the Deaf for so many years in American Sign Language ironically made me more attuned to listening. I would think about all the things they were unable to hear and thus appreciate my hearing even more. This year our garden has been a musical haven. I don't know if it is the abundant rains or my husband's careful planting, but this is the most alive our garden has ever been, from the chatter of insects to the buzzing of bees to the songbirds--even the more subtle sounds of the hummingbirds flitting between the Bird of Paradise to their feeding station, a sound one does not hear unless listening intently. I can thank the Deaf, as well as my many years of listening as a psychoanalyst, for developing my listening skills.
It's interesting, but I guess not surprising, that working with a population who cannot hear or who have impaired hearing gave you an increased attunement to listening. It makes sense in the same way that the lack of something makes us more aware of it, as if we become more sensitized by scarcity. And of course since your work literally involved listening as a practitioner, you would be more aware of that particular sense.
How lovely that your garden is a burgeoning soundscape this year! You have a flourishing of biophony, to use the word that Tricia Kyzer reminded us of. That's a gift, and I suspect is both because of the rains--rain is definitely the key ingredient for life here in the desert!--and your husband's plantings. Enjoy the sounds of life and liveliness!
Such lovely photos, and such wisdom. "...the various players in nature’s “orchestra." Nice
Thanks much, Diane! I appreciate you taking the time to read and comment. Blessings!
I love this, soundscapes are so delicate and easily fractured by engine sounds and other low rumbling vibrations. I spend a lot of time immersing in my local woods soundscape. An aspect that I have noticed is how this is truly surround sound, 360 degrees, the tiniest chirp or rustle or wind can come from anywhere.
Thank you for sharing this important observation - hey! There it is again, a vision based word. I suppose I should rather say, I hear you.
"Surround sound" is a great way to describe that kind of immersion in natural soundscapes, and I am glad your local woods offers that experience. It's true that the sounds of human activity--especially mechanical activity from engines--pollutes natural soundscapes so easily. If only we took noise pollution more seriously!
And thanks for the chuckle about how prevalent our vision-based vocabulary is. Blessings!
Loved hearing the sandhill cranes. What a treat for me to see them in such a different landscape than here in Wisconsin where Aldo Leopold observed them. See with my ears. Listen with my eyes. Re-wiring my connections.
I do love sandhill cranes' voices! The cranes here are greater sandhill cranes, while the ones you and Aldo Leopold are/were familiar with are lesser sandhills. The difference is size--ours stand about six inches taller and weigh a few more pounds. But there are many fewer of the greater sandhills than your lesser ones. I think the whole Rocky Mountain flock of greater sandhills numbers just over 20,000 birds, while the lesser sandhills of the Great Plains and Midwest number around half a million birds.
And yes, rewiring neural connections. I love "See with my ears. Listen with my eyes." Exactly!
Fewer greater, more lesser. That I can remember. Thanks for that distinction. I've never seen a great sandhill crane.
Wonderful thoughts. I’m listening right now. Wouldn’t our public places all benefit from nature sounds!
Yes, our public places would all benefit from nature sounds. They would be subtly soothing and would ground us. Happy listening!
Thank you for this important reminder about listening to nature. Since moving out of a city 15 years ago, my listening skills and knowledge of my landscape is improved. I am not a great birder but I can identify many of the species that live alongside me. The app Merlin has been a wonderful tool to help me identify what I am hearing.
Check out this petition about protecting soundscapes. w.npca.org/advocacy/50-save-the-wild-natural-sounds-of-the-olympic-peninsula
Sue, I am glad you are out where you can listen and be part of that landscape, and I would say if you can identify many of the birds that live around and along with you, you're a very good birder indeed. Merlin is a great help too. :)
I saw a news story on that effort and am delighted that National Parks and Conservation Association is championing protecting soundscapes (finally--it's taken a while for the idea to become compelling, I think). The Park Service has been recording natural soundscapes at all NPS places for a couple of decades, and even in that time, the deterioration is startling and sad.
Soundscapes are fascinating and visceral. The song of the cranes has always seemed a primal sound of music that has drifted down through the eons, as well as being heard in the present. The soundscape of the prairie is a favorite of mine. Others are: crickets, aspen leaves rustling, grasses in the wind, the wind herself, bird favorites: meadowlark, redwinged blackbird, bluebirds, hawks, killdeer, curlew, robins and wrens. The small sound of a horse's eye blinking is another lovely sound.
And right now outside my early morning window, a covey of two adult and a swarm of small quail, just big enough to fly scurry around. Hard to beat their cuteness!
Jenny, I agree about crane calls and how they seem to come from deep time, and appeal to we humans at the cellular level. And I love your list of favorite sounds, especially the less obvious ones, including a horse's eye blinking. I often put my ear to tree trunks to see if I can hear their circulation. Sometimes it seems that I can, though I'm not sure.
Re quail: the other day I watched a family of scaled quail cross the road near my house and counted 13 half-grown quail plus two adults. That's quite a brood, and as you say, their cuteness factor is off the charts. :)
I've tried listening to trees, too. And like you write, sometimes I think I hear something. How neat to have your quail family nearby!