Sounding the alarm

Our planet has a soundtrack. There are the birds, of course — the chirps, warbles, tweedles, whistles and clicks of the dawn chorus. But mammals play in Earth’s orchestra, too. Lions roar. Moose bellow. The panther has its deadly purr.

Insects are famously chatty; just ask the cicadas. Crocodiles snap. And where would Earth’s concert be without the languorous basso of the bullfrog? Fish burble. Whales sing in linguistically discrete dialects. Coral reefs are underwater symphonies with shrimp snapping out the beat.

Plants emit sound waves. Pea seedlings listen for the flow of water. Bacteria converse, albeit at ranges higher than we can hear. Even a fungus may be able to talk; scientists say the thready networks of root fungi that link forests may be as gabby as a schoolyard at recess.

It’s not just the living that sing. Winds rustle. Water falls. Thunder booms. Glaciers splinter and the planet’s crust cracks into rifts.

Together, these sounds tell a story that scientists are just learning to decode.

“Sound is a really marvellous thing that’s around us that we’ve just ignored as a global society, but also as a scientific community,” says Bryan Pijanowski, an avian ecologist at Purdue University in Indiana who established the research discipline of soundscape ecology in 2011 along with a few colleagues.

The idea that sound is a clue to the health of our world began to be examined about 60 years ago when the American naturalist Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, an elegy to the vast numbers of birds killed by pesticides.

In the decades since, new generations of scientists have begun piecing together just how critical the acoustic assemblage of the planet is for creatures that communicate by sound.

“Let’s go to the ice house.” That is one of my favourite things to hear, since it means a successful harvest from fishing, whaling or sealing. Growing up in Tuktoyaktuk, in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Northwest Territories, we regarded the community ice house as a cultural gift from our ancestors. Built in the early ’60s to preserve and store food, it ensured the community’s survival through the darkest and coldest months of the year.
Once families began living year-round in Tuktoyaktuk, extended families built their own ice houses. These ice houses were built into the permafrost in a similar fashion to how settlers built root cellars on the Prairies. As Tuktoyaktuk became more of a permanent settlement, a communal underground freezer became a necessity. One of my five uncles, Uncle Frank (Pokiak), shared with me that he and several young men worked on the construction of the ice house with my Daduck (grandfather), Bertram Pokiak, the foreman on the project, in 1963.
The community ice house is by a road, but on higher ground next to the beach in the harbour. There is a boat launch right below the bank, about 25 metres from the entrance to the ice house, allowing families to bring their harvest by boat directly to it for immediate preservation.
Digging into the permafrost to construct the underground freezer was done using pickaxes, shovels and chisels. To enter it today, a hatch in the floor of a small shed leads to a one-metre-by-one-metre shaft deep into the ground. A ladder descends nine metres down into the permafrost to the ice house, comprising three corridors and 19 rooms. One corridor runs east, another south and the third west, all dug away from the harbour into the higher ground. Each room is assigned to an individual and their extended family, and is accessed through a numbered door and a narrow passageway. Rooms measure about three-by-three metres, ranging from 1.5 to two metres high.

With a golden-orange beak and distinctive flashes of white on its shoulder and tail feathers that contrast with its umber-brown plumage, the Steller’s sea-eagle is a remarkable sight. But a sighting of this bird in North America is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it’s thousands of kilometres outside its usual range in the Russian Far East down to Japan.

Gerry Isaac, a ranger from the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation, was the first to call in a sighting of the eagle in New Brunswick in June 2021. Birders were stunned to discover that, based on the bird’s plumage, this was the same bird seen in Texas a few months earlier, and in Alaska a year prior. It has since earned itself a cult following (the “Steller’s Sea Eagle in Canada” Facebook group has over 3,000 members and counting), with birders flocking to get a glimpse of this seemingly lost individual.

This eagle is known to biologists and birders as a “vagrant,” an animal broadly defined as being found outside its usual geographic range.

“Historically, [vagrancy has] not been well studied, perhaps partly because some people thought it was frivolous,” says Alexander Lees, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, who recently co-wrote a book called Vagrancy in Birds. Lees says that while there may not have been much interest in studying the phenomenon in the past, growing interest in the study of vagrancy is allowing researchers to amass data that is helping us to better understand these patterns. Lees’ 2021 book breaks down the reasons for vagrancy into external (exogenous) and internal (endogenous) factors. It’s usually a subtle combination of the two that results in vagrancy (see a range of examples on the map).

Three cheers for three recent additions at the Toronto Zoo! The popular additions to the zoo menagerie are wood bison calves — two female and one male — that were born in late June. Two of the calves were born from an innovative reproductive technique that allows scientists to generate more females. It’s the first-time sex-sorted artificial insemination has been used in wood bison.

This technology can help increase the number of female wood bison both in captivity and in free-roaming herds and is an important step forward for the long-term sustainability of bison conservation herds. Ongoing diseases in wild populations continue to threaten this species.

“The primary reason of this phase of the project is to produce non-diseased bison that one day can be reintroduced into the wild,” says Dr. Gabriela Mastromonaco, senior director of wildlife science at the Toronto Zoo.

The little ones are healthy and active, chasing each other and exploring their surroundings. Curious by nature, they like to investigate all features of their landscape.
The bees of the sea

In the same way that bees, butterflies and hummingbirds play a vital role in the pollination of flowering plants on land, scientists have discovered that small, bug-like crustaceans work hard to help the propagation of algae underwater.

While Idotea balthica specifically pollinate red seaweed, found growing in tidal pools, the findings published in the journal Science suggest that animal-mediated underwater pollination may be widespread and perhaps even first evolved underwater rather than on land. While fertilization with the help of animals was believed to have emerged among plants when they moved ashore 450 million years ago, red seaweed arose over 800 million years ago meaning their animal-based fertilization may predate that of pollination on land.

Just as with bees and plants on land, the benefits may well be mutual. The findings suggest the crustaceans use the algae as a safe place to shelter as well as a source of food in the form of the single-celled algae that grows on red seaweed.

around Peninsula Valdes, while further south one can find king, gentoo and Magellanic penguins in the straights of Tierra del Fuego. As many species of penguins can be found here as one can hope to see on an average Antarctic journey, and even leopard seals are a possibility!

Further inland we find the best puma (or mountain lion) viewing on the planet. With the impressive Torres del Paine as towering backdrops we’ll be guaranteed to observe and photograph guanacos, rheas, and condors roaming free in their natural settings, and with some patience we hope to see puma up close. It’s springtime in Patagonia and all of the breeding birds will be showing their best. These include austral parakeet, Chilean flamingo, chocolate-vented tyrant, flightless steamer-duck and perhaps the endangered Magellanic plover.

The UNESCO-designated Peninsula Valdes is where orcas haul out on the beach to have a go at elephant seal pups (a la National Geographic!), however this is a very rare event.

In Argentina we’ll enjoy the food and wine culture that this modern destination offers, while in Chile the quaint atmosphere and friendly locals will further enrich our experience.

Overall this is an enjoyable jaunt through a stark and jaw-dropping landscape full of history, culture and of course, wild animals.

Meet your RCGS Travel Ambassadors: David and Kim Gray

Check out these other upcoming trips:

- Caribbean Mountains to the Coast with Marlis Butcher
- Grizzly Bears of Toba Inlet with Wilson and Charlene Bearhead
- Saskatchewan Whooping Cranes with Myrna Pearman