Photo credit: Ray Bilcliff
by Arline L. Bronzaft, Ph.D., Board of Directors, GrowNYC, Co-founder, The Quiet Coalition, and Honorary Chair, Quiet American Skies
Alexandra Marvar’s recent article in the New York Times explores the importance of birding to Susan Glass, a Saratoga, California resident who has been blind since birth. Glass, now 67, has been tuned in to bird sounds since she was a child. In lieu of visual cues, her surroundings are instead mapped by the birds who inhabit these spaces.
I have already written about how COVID resulted in more people listening to birds, including my daughter who lives in Queens, New York. My daughter cannot spend much time in her garden because of the frequent and intrusive sounds of planes overhead. When the pandemic started and the number of planes taking off lessened, she started to spend more time in her backyard and would call me to tell me how comforting she found the sounds and sights of these birds. Last week she said, “another plane, another plane, another plane.” She then left her back yard.
Marvar explains that lockdown gave many people the opportunity to tune in to the birds in their environment, even though the central theme of her article centers on the increase in the “birding community” and the inclusion of those who have visual deficiencies and other disabilities. Listening to birds is indeed pleasurable as well as anxiety reducing. One of the blind individuals interviewed for the article said that bird watching gave him “a connection with a world I can’t see.” Another person pointed out that you can readily hear more birds than you can see and listening provides more information about the surrounding environment for blind people. Furthermore, Marvar states that with so many birds only being identified by their sounds, blind people and individuals who enjoy using their ears to detect birds can feel comfortable as birders.
Birders, like so many of the Quiet Coalition’s readers, recognize that noise pollution is a harmful pollutant. In this case, noise pollution is changing the sounds birds make. Birds are straining to be heard over the din of human-made noises. Glass is quoted as saying that bird sounds in general are declining, a phenomenon that can be attributed to fewer numbers of birds. Can this be due to noise pollution?
To those of us who enjoy listening and seeing birds, please urge people to take action to protect our beautiful birds.
