Coe Park by Ear
If we dropped you onto your favorite spot in Henry Coe State Park, blindfolded, and asked you to identify the place by ear, do you think you could? Can you imagine, as you read this, what that place sounds like?
Sound is fundamental to the survival of most animal species. Animals use sound to locate and attract mates, and hearing is a key mechanism for finding prey and avoiding predators. Humans create sounds that can intrude into wild places and disturb animal communications, alter behavior and predator/prey relationships, and ultimately degrade habitat suitability. Often, the earliest evidence of human impact on wild ecosystems, whether due to development, pollution, intrusion or over-use, over flights, or climate change, can be detected in the sound of a place.
With this in mind, in 2017 the San Francisco based Nature Sounds Society launched a study of soundscapes in selected locations of the park. Principle investigator Steve Sergeant and fellow experts started collecting dusk and dawn soundscapes in 2017.
For a sample, click on the play button in the SoundCloud player below. Click on the title of any clip to hear it in the player. Click on the title of the clip in the player to get an explanation of the clip and the conditions of the recording from the SoundCloud site. Revisit this page regularly to hear new sounds.