Close your eyes. Listen. What do you hear?
The winter wind whispers across the barren white landscape rattling dried seed heads. Dancing with the snow, it becomes visible, swirling higher and higher until a strong gust howls and crashes like a great wave breaking against a shore. The snow settles over the top of a drift, waiting to dance again.
Hoo hoo hoo…hoo hoo hoo. From the shelter of a farmer’s grove, a great-horned owl punctuates the deep cold air. Tired of his solitary song he calls for a mate under the pale sliver of light from a crescent moon. Will she answer? Will they find each other in the long night?
Snowflakes transform into sleet. Winter’s hangover lingers. Snow melts into pools and small ponds. They are glazed with thin sheets of ice that melt in the midday sun and refreeze overnight. Daylight lengthens. Soil thaws and grows warmer.
A box that listens. Place the box on the prairie and walk away. It records what it hears.
A flutter of wings. The first migrants arrive to stake out territory. Robins chirp and tune their songs.
Smoke rises, small flames curl and crackle as fire slowly burns through the flattened straw of last year’s vegetation. A quiet day; the wind sleeps. Soft green growth appears as needlegrass, June grass, reedgrass, and sedges return to life.
Trilling and buzzing in high-pitched metallic notes, boreal chorus frogs, Cope’s gray tree frogs, and Great Plains toads fill the spring nights with a cacophony of sound. They soon swell the pools and ponds with clusters of slippery translucent eggs.
The melody and harmony of birdsong rises and falls with the sun. The chorus grows louder day by day.
For early spring mornings the prairie is transformed into a concert stage. The orchestra begins warming up in the wee hours before dawn. Bobolinks, Western Meadowlarks, Barn Swallows, Yellow Warblers, Common Yellowthroats, and American Goldfinches raise clear fluted solos, poetic burbling verses, and lyrical string-quartets. Percussion notes and spiraling trills are added by Brewer’s and Red-winged Blackbirds, Sedge Wrens, and a host of sparrows: Song, Chipping, Swamp, Clay-colored, Savannah, and Field. Deep trombone and tuba harmonies arise from a pair of Ravens, and a small parliament of Boreal, Burrowing, and Great-horned owls. The performance reaches its climax with the eerie winnowing flight-song of Wilson’s Snipes.
Competitions and love songs trail away. Busy birds shift their time to nesting and feeding chicks.
Sparks of color bloom amongst the bright green grasses as they stretch skyward. Lavender pasque flowers, small irises, harebells, bright pink phlox, and little white nodding ladies’ tresses announce their presence. The landscape shivers as the wind tickles patches of upright, feathery soft, pink seed heads on prairie smoke flowers.
Cool spring showers give way to warm summer breezes. Bluestems, prairie dropseed, and switchgrasses rustle and fidget as they grow taller.
The buzz-saw whine of cicadas interrupts the chatter of katydids and metronome chirp of crickets. Waves of tall grasses wash across the landscape, crashing against each other under strong winds. A thunderstorm approaches. Drip, plip, plop, the first raindrops land. The drops multiply rapidly into an overwhelming sound like gravel being poured on a metal roof. The listening box cannot distinguish the sounds of the storm, it is all noise.
Return to the prairie after several weeks to retrieve the eavesdropping box. A bioacoustics recorder safely encased in a metal lockbox. Whose stories does it hold? What secrets will be revealed?
BlueMarble notes 