Nocturnal auditory signatures

While I was home helping Dad cut down everything murdered by the ash borer, I noticed something that I really liked. The sound of Dad's yard is unique to me.

When I was in junior high, I spent the night at a friend's house. He had a tepee in the back yard, and after a few hours of bonfire, we crawled into it for the night. Things slowly settled down (teenage boys are biologically incapable of settling down quickly. If you think that we have, we are fooling you), and eventually we were ready to actually sleep.

Then I heard the roaring.

"What the hell is that??"

"The neighbor's lions."

"...When you say 'lions'..."

His neighbor across the road had a couple lions in a pen. "Across the road" sounds close, but my friend's house (and tepee) were at the far end of a half-mile long driveway through dense forest. I don't know how far away the lions were, but their growls carried through the night, the trees, and the thin canvas walls of our shelter. I wasn't afraid; I was fascinated. I was thrilled. Lions!! I fell asleep grinning after listening to them for ages.

In high school, we spent a week on Hilton Head Island in my great-aunt's time-share. We went out walking at night and heard the bellowing of mating alligators. We never saw them; we just heard them, the growls carrying far through the swampy areas.

I developed a useful skill in college. The campus was in an urban area near a hospital and railroad tracks. Occasionally, police helicopters with searchlights would fly overhead. Trains, sirens, and medical helicopters were commonplace. Now I don't hear any of those when I sleep. On several bike rides and a few hikes, we've camped near train tracks and everyone else will stumble out of their tents in the morning complaining about the trains all night long, and I never hear any of them.

Along the trail last year, I learned a few things about whippoorwills. They love to nest near shelters and tent sites, they are nocturnal, and they will inexhaustibly defend their territory by singing at it. For hours. One night, I set up my tent at a border zone between three whippoorwills, and heard them each singing at the others as I set up my tent, got water, stretched, made dinner, wrote in my journal, and read for a while. I met one hiker who said that he hated whippoorwills because his childhood bedroom had a nest nearby, and that he never slept at night when they were present. I loved them.

At Punchbowl Shelter, which was rumored to be haunted, there is a small pond full of singing frogs. My trail name was Treefrog; I fell asleep listening to the songs of my people. (peeple?) Later, in Maine, we camped at a shelter on a pond where I could hear four distinct species of frogs singing. It was fantastic.

In the south, I often heard owls. I could recognize the barred owl by its call because I'd done a lot of research on them after one of my training hikes. I'm not that good with other species, but at Overmountain Shelter (the Barn), I could hear four different types of owls calling out in the woods. One of them was barred. I can only guess at the others.

In the far north, we were occasionally lucky enough to hear loons. They will call throughout the day, but the sound is especially clear--and unsettling--at night, when their eerie voice echoes in the darkness.

Each place has its own night sounds. At Dad's, I lay in bed at night and listened to the very specific chorus of chirring bugs and singing frogs, and it felt instantly familiar. It was the same sound I listened to as a kid, falling asleep every summer evening. No other back yard sounds quite like Dad's, and as much as I love the sounds of all those other places, that's the place that sounds like home.