The soundscape of your happiness - #120

What you hear affects how you are.

There is no birdsong here, not at my house, not in the winter, not at this elevation. In the books I am reading, there is also no birdsong. One book is set in a magic school located within a void where this is no outside; the other is set in space. Each book’s heroine is barely holding it together, and down here on Earth, I feel similarly.

Winter isn’t a carte blanche excuse to be bird-less. Many lower elevations have a bounty of birds, busy with their winter foraging and eating from their warm weather caches. But here, even the magpies don’t bother. The valley offers a dearth of trees, and only as you enter the perimeter wood into the high basins do you hear the occasional mountain chickadee or gray jay. Around the corner and up the hill a bit, there’s one house whose history includes an owner who loved trees, and it’s the only one surrounded by them. I think I counted six bird feeders the last time I walked by, and it’s the only place in town you can hear chirping this time of year.

But not today. Not in the white spin cycle of a storm. Today, the only birdsong to be found is the one playing from my laptop. 

A few weeks back, as winter stretched and settled in and my own depression seemed to do the same, I found myself scrolling Instagram. In the midst of my scrolling, I heard birds. I looked around, sort of befuddled, until I realized the photo I’d stopped on in my scroll wasn’t a still, but a video that barely moved. It was a scenic shot of my last home, Topanga Canyon, and in the early morning light, the birds were singing. 

I stared at the video. It’s beautiful! But something else was happening in my brain, and it didn’t take long to realize the instigator was the birds. In the 45 seconds I disassociated to a little chirp chirping, I felt real, palpable relief. And so, I went to Spotify and began my new obsession of playing jungle bird sounds in the house. 

I’ve spent many years working in the behavioral health and mindfulness space, almost all of them coinciding with my own cognitive behavioral therapy. In tandem with medical teams, I’ve written thousands upon thousands of words about how to manage mental health issues. I’ve journaled, I’ve exercised, I’ve called and texted friends, I’ve had many a glass of water and a snack, I’ve gone to therapy and employed the many tactics taught, but few things have the pouring-water-in-a-glass-of-stones pervasive effect of birdsong. 

When the sounds of the jungle fill the house, the cats emerge from their sleeping nooks,  crouched low for a hunt, eyes peeled toward the ceiling. That’s where the birds are, up. That’s where my spirits are, up. 

Of all the things we looked for in a new home, we didn’t consider birds. They were blanketed in “nature,” assuming living surrounded by protected lands just guaranteed birds. And summer does. All the mountain regulars make an appearance, enjoying a bounty before their imminent relocation. I’m not sure if asking the realtors to stand in silence outside one February morning would’ve revealed reality, if I would have been more attuned to how quiet the town was, and not how quiet everything was. We turned on faucets to check water pressure, we held incense to cracks in the logs to watch the shifting shafts of smoke, we even did close our eyes to listen for enemy number 1: the dreaded house hum. But that was inside. We did not listen outside. 

Surely this doesn’t matter though? I am in big nature every day, assuming I leave the house. There is nothing to breathe but mountain air so crisp that it’s only a matter of time before Nestlé tries to bottle and sell it. But my nervous system, suddenly filled with the freshness of life piping from the speakers, would beg otherwise. 

We know nature is good for us. It’s been studied extensively. Meta-analysis shows that exposure to nature decreases cortisol, anxiety, self-reported stress, and blood pressure. Even if it hadn’t been studied, we could simply look at the indoor plant industry. We’re practically foaming at the mouth to get more plants in our houses. The Global Indoor Plants Market size was over 16 billion in 2022, expected to be over 30 billion by 2032. Plants were a big part of why we bought this cabin. It was part of our negotiation: the owner didn’t want to sell to us unless we agreed to become the lasting patrons of several decades-old houseplants. 

But people aren’t flocking to their local Petcos to buy parakeets. So why were birds I had no nostalgia for, no connection with, playing over a sound system in a drafty cabin making me feel so alive? 

Bird lovers are obsessive people — not very surprising given that birds are the Pokemon of the real world. And where there’s obsession, there’s science. Let’s explore. 

First, do birds actually make a difference in the nature soundscape?

One study published in the peer-reviewed Royal Publishing Society acknowledged that we know nature helps, but we’re entirely sure if biodiversity or perceptions of it contribute to the benefits. So they sent people on a trail. One group of people experienced the trail as it exists naturally. The other group that took the trail was exposed to an extra layer of a “phantom chorus” piped in from hidden speakers to give the perception of more birds. Surprise, surprise: hikers with the amped-in chorus reported higher levels of restorative effects — an argument in general for protecting biodiversity, and a reason why the occasional magpie in a high elevation winter doesn’t quite cut it. 

Second, does it matter which birds?

The long and short of current research is no, it doesn’t matter, but as indicated above, it matters how many. A study published in Nature examined the effect of not only urban (traffic) noise versus birdsongs on mood, paranoia, and cognitive performance, but also the impact of lower versus higher diversity in those soundscapes, so either more variety in traffic noises or more diversity in birds. 

For all the city slickers who say they love to fall asleep to the sound of sirens, the science says you’ll feel better elsewhere. The participants in the study who were exposed to traffic scapes reported a significant increase in depression, where the birdsong participants reported decreases in anxiety and paranoia. Worth noting, depression only decreased for the group exposed to the high diversity birds. A Petco parakeet wasn’t going to cut it. But a Spotify playlist of jungle birds? Now we’re getting somewhere. In whole, birdsong improved anxiety regardless of diversity, and traffic increased depression, regardless of diversity. Maybe try playing the bird playlist in your car? 

My instinct based on how miserable everyone seems to be is that no one is getting enough nature or birdsong. And it seems like that might be right: way back in 2001, before the wide adoption of the internet, before the iPhone, before YouTube and Instagram and Twitter, the EPA sponsored a 2-year telephone survey on human activity in the United States. Respondents reported spending “an average of 87% of their time in enclosed buildings and about 6% of their time in enclosed vehicles.” This survey is over 20 years old, but despite our Covid obsession with national parks, I can’t imagine it’s much better now. 

This essay comes to you pre-scheduled, and when it arrives in your inboxes, I’ll be (hopefully) waking up in the treetops of the Nicoya Peninsula to the sounds of macaws, caracaras, herons, vultures, hawks, falcons, parrots, woodpeckers, toucans, kingfishers, and more. I wanted one last trip, just the two of us. I wanted a little sun and sand. But mostly, I wanted some goddamn birds. The good news about the science is that you don’t need a plane ticket to find reprieve – all you really need are some speakers and the regional playlist of your choice. 

So that’s your homework for today: either take yourself on a biodiverse walk, or play one in your house. Let the birds do the work today. You’ve done quite enough.

---

Playlists:

Related:

Why do you feed them? - #37

What about bird? - #38

Saving the owl:

Part 1, Part 2

keltonwrites

A post shared by @keltonwrites