There are subtle sounds in nature that often go unnoticed.
It’s easy to hear a bird singing, or a cow bellowing. Creeks with moving waters are also easily detected.
But some sounds are drowned out by the loud parts of nature we all know and love. You may hear them but not pay attention to them. Outdoor meditation is one way to begin hearing more than the immediate, recognizable sounds. Once you’ve begun to notice subtle sounds in nature, you’ll start identifying and enjoying the important notes they play in the symphony going on around you.
Once I learned to listen deeper in nature, these are some of the lesser mentioned sounds you can hear. I am certain there are more – these are just the ones I’ve encountered and noted out here at Wild Ozark so far.
Creek songs
A body of water has a multitude of songs and sounds. It changes according to location, the flow, obstacles in the path, … Every spill on a single creek has a voice of its own. Every cove along a beach will sing a different tune. To the untrained ear, the water sounds simply like ‘water’. But to one who has learned to listen, the sounds are a rich melody, incomplete without absorbing them all.
And since it’s impossible to absorb them all, there is a lifetime of opportunity to enjoy as many of the tunes as you can. And it’s imperative to pause long enough to do so when unexpected opportunities arise.
These encounters are my sort of ‘stopping to smell the roses’. And yes. It does feel important, and it feels relational, as well.
Beetles rummaging
When I first started learning to hear the subtle sounds in nature, it was through what I call forest sitting meditation. Here’s how to do it: find a spot away from too much modern sounds and have a seat.
Notice the sounds you hear, without trying to find the source. You’ll hear the loud noisy things first, maybe some birds or other animals. Perhaps the wind is blowing and you’ll hear the leaves rustle or a creek flowing.
Keep listening deeper. Listen closer.
When I started listing to the smaller sounds, the closer sounds, I heard a rustling happening nearby beneath the leaves on the forest floor. Eventually I did get curious, and at this point I do recommend following that curiosity. I tracked down the rustling sound to a beetle moving beneath the leaves. It was gratifying to see the source of the sound.
In another instance, the ability to listen closer to the subtle sounds in nature yielded a more practical result. A tomato hornworm was somewhere in the tomato plants but I couldn’t find it. So I sat among the tomatoes and just listened. I used the same process to go from the noisy local sounds to filter down towards the nearby small sounds.
And there it was. I could hear the hornworm actually chewing a leaf. With the sound cued in, I tracked it to the worm and removed it from the garden.
Insects chewing & Lizards Skittering
So many opportunities for deep listening happen in a garden. This morning I heard the skittering of a fence lizard and the sound of a chewing wasp, both on the bamboo cross-beam over one of my beds.
Practical Listening
This same sort of filtered listening helped me find a spring source on our property. There was a constant wet spot on the ground at the bottom of a hill, so I hiked upwards. It became steep enough that I had to take breaks by standing in front of trees to lean on them. My heartbeat was the loudest thing during the break the first time. I rested until the sound of my own heart subsided.
Then I heard the quiet sound. A drip. Silence. Another drip. As with the insect chewing and the beetle rummaging, I followed the sound. Once I found it, I hiked up the hill/mountain higher over the sighted drip. Again, the sound of my own heart drowned all other noises so I rested and listened. Again I tracked the drip and continued that way up the hill.
The source was at the base of a large boulder on a bench about halfway up the mountain. A pool of crystal clear cold water gathered at the base of that rock, and it was a magical sight to see.
Life and death struggles
I’ve written before about the balance of nature and our predator/prey relationships out here at Wild Ozark. While I don’t enjoy witnessing or causing the death of any living creature, it is part of life here.
On this occasion, I heard the sound of something small and shrill but I didn’t know what it was. Distress was obvious and my ears had tuned into the sound so I could move towards it fairly easily.
When I tracked it down what I found was a large black rat snake eating a mouse. It was already halfway swallowed. My first reaction made me want to save it (the mouse). But the second reaction was restraint.
This was nature, doing what nature does, in the midst of nature. It wasn’t my place to intervene. The snake needed to eat. But that didn’t make me think the mouse needed to die, but it was necessity in order for the snake to survive.
When it comes to my chickens (which died in a racoon massacre a few weeks ago) or any other animal or plant that relies on me for protection, the predator’s needs are not my concern.
Unfortunately for my chickens, I didn’t hear them in their time of need or I would have defended them against the raccoons.
Go Out and Seek the Subtle Sounds in Nature
There’s a whole new world to discover! Let me know what you find?
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Author/Artist Info
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In the summer of 2018 I began making watercolor paints from the rocks, clay, and other resources of our land here in the Ozarks. In 2023 I began experimenting with the same pigments in oils. I love this medium and now paint in oils almost always. I call them Wild Ozark Paleo Paints, because they’re made in a way very close to the same way paints were made when man first put a hand-print on the wall of a cave. I use very small amounts of outsourced pigment for blue, white, and sometimes yellow to offer a greater range of hues built upon the earthy local pigments. My specialty is painting nature, specifically the nature that surrounds me here in the remote hills of northwest Arkansas.
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Madison Woods
@wildozark (Instagram, Twitter, Threads and FB)
madison@wildozark.com
