Unless you’re a fugitive, an ecologist or a crocodile, swamps are terrible. Yes, yes, yes – very important ecological super niches and all that. But the mud, the quicksand, the insects, the predators; the deep, abiding discomforts of brute creation; the steam-press heat and humidity; the particular stink of marsh gas bubbles and the generalised stench of rot and genesis – it all pretty much sucks. Unless you’re Liz Znidersic.
“For me it’s bliss,” she says. “It’s muddy. It bites. Every mozzie there is as big as a small bird. You drive through a cloud of them [and] it’s like bullets hitting the windscreen.”
But it’s bliss.
Specifically, the sort of bliss an audiophile super-nerd feels when slipping on a new pair of Sennheiser Orpheus cans – they’ll set you back a hundred thousand dollarydoos full retail – to listen to a virgin wax pressing of their favourite band at 33rpm.
Dr Znidersic likes to listen.
Specifically, she likes to listen for cryptic bird species, the sneaky ones, who hide out in the world’s gnarliest wetlands, staying silent for weeks at a time, almost as though they know she’s out there, listening for them, and they will be damned if they’ll give her the satisfaction of a single tweet.
Until recently, hunting for fugitive species, especially birds, in remote and punishing wilderness was expensive, difficult and more often than not futile. A researcher might embed themselves in the big muddy for a couple of weeks, listening and recording, but the scope was finite, the returns contingent, and the points of failure many.
Advances in audio technology, batteries, and increasingly in solar-cell power began to fundamentally and rapidly rewrite the equation. Small recording units with weeks or even months of power could be placed throughout an area of interest and left to record the soundscape of the local environment 24/7.
In some ways sound is an even richer resource for studying ecologies than direct or recorded visual observations. Like the reader of a first-person novel, a
