Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents -The audio portion of this story starts with a chorus of croaking frog voices, rising up from a wetland. After a few seconds, the distant call of an owl is introduced.
Autumn Barrett-Morgan first learned about soundscapes when she was studying bird identification in college, but it really come alive after she became a Monitoring Technician with the Friends of Cortes Island Society.
“In the past two or three years, I started really diving into the soundscape. On the Dillon Creek Wetland Restoration Project, I found it really important in birding, because not all birds are visible or make themselves visible and that left me not knowing who I'm listening to. So it got me really inspired to dive into observing the soundscape through studying the bird calls once I got back home,” she said.
A series of short whistled hoots mixes with the cresendo of ‘rib-its’ in the audio.
Barrett-Morgan explained, “This is what the soundscape could sound like. That relationship between two species, the Western Screech Owl’s breeding call and the breeding and mating call of the Pacific Chorus Frog a few days before the first day of spring. Of course, we are manipulating that soundscape by playing a recording, but that is what a West Coast wetland could sound like and does sound like in many parts of Western British Columbia,” explained Autumn Barrett-Morgan, a Monitoring Technician with the Friends of Cortes Island Society.
“Once you develop and deepen your relationship to the soundscape, you become enchanted by all of the sounds that you hear. You notice the absence of any species that you're used to hearing at a certain time of year, it can actually have a profound impact emotionally on someone because that the relationship that we have to that species is no longer presenting itself.”
“That's something that I've been really tuned into throughout this Western Screech Owl monitoring project, that FOCI has been embarking upon last spring season, as well as this current one.”
“Sabina Leader Mense and I have been walking the forest at night with volunteers and doing call playback surveys, which is essentially projecting a mating call of the male western screech owl into the forest at night to elicit a response from hopefully another Western Screech Owl. We have had one observation on the northern tip of Cortes Island.”
“I haven't personally heard a Western Screech Owl on Cortes, and so I don't have that historical knowledge of that soundscape. But I know that many, many people that grew up here know the call very well. Over the past few decades that sound has become absent.”
“When I think about soundscapes and species at risk, this is an area often overlooked within soundscapes.”
“The declining of population sizes has, of course, a significant impact on the landscape and the web of life that plays out here on the earth plane, but also in the soundscape.”
“What I love about that recording that we started this interview with was to be able to actually hear what we could be hearing if Western Screech owls were in this neck of the woods.”
