Hear Olympic National Park at Its Most Musical

For those of us sheltering in place, it’s easy to feel the walls of our homes closing in. But sound can set us free. All we need to do is listen. In these eight episodes, you'll hear soundscapes from the wildest places on the planet personally selected by host Gordon Hempton, the Sound Tracker, from his thousands of hours of recordings. In these difficult times, we hope that these sonic portraits can truly be an escape. Grab your headphones, relax, and let's listen...

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Breaking Down Barriers and Finding Home in Nature

The home for all special productions from BirdNote

The Zabalo River in Ecuador is teeming with life — and you can hear it.

A great place to listen to insects — and birds — is a remote mountain lake in the spring. The surrounding mountians and properties of the cold water make these lakes some of nature's great concert halls.  Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist and sonic guide for the this series, recorded the sounds of this lake in Washington’s Methow Valley. The air is so clear of noise you’ll actually be able to hear the tiny splashes of lake trout gobbling up insects from just below the surface. Now let's...

You might think of the Mississippi River as the central artery of North America. More than 300 species of birds - billions of birds - make their way north from Central and South America every year along the Mississippi Flyway, with the river at the heart of their route. The young Samuel Langhorne Clemens - later known as Mark Twain - loved the sounds of the river. He signed on to train as a pilot on a riverboat when he was just 22. And Twain quickly discovered that if he volunteered for the...

Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area is a massive inland peninsula, bordered by sections of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers that were permanently flooded as a part of FDR’s New Deal. The damming of the rivers in the mid 1900s submerged lots of little towns and farms and old family cemeteries. If you take a trip to the park and you have a boat, you can actually still see the ruins of some of the towns, deep beneath the surface. Humans changed this landscape, but now birds have...

We’re back with our guide, Gordon Hempton, the Sound Tracker. Today he’s taking us to Saskatchewan’s Grasslands National Park, just a few miles north of the Canada/US border. As you’re listening, close your eyes and envision how all of these voices fit together — how each one is settled into just the right place on the spectrum.

The Big Island of Hawaii is home to more than two hundred species of birds, some of which are found on this island and nowhere else. But down on the beaches and in the lowlands, don’t be surprised if you hear quite a few familiar voices. People have brought new birds to Hawaii from all over the world. Up into the rainforest, however, you can hear something truly sublime… you’ll enter one of the planet’s great forest refuges. And there you’ll hear the sounds of Hawaii’s native birds in their...

Gordon Hempton has spent his life recording the sounds of the natural world, from the rainforest of Hawai’i to the vast dry prairies of North America. Then, one morning, he woke up to silence. Ever since his first sudden encounter with hearing loss, Gordon has made it his mission to share the art of truly listening. He believes that in our noisy, busy world we’ve forgotten how to hear. With Sound Escapes, a new podcast from BirdNote, we teach you how to listen with new ears.