The thing that struck me on the second day of my two-week visit to Detroit in June was how peaceful the city sounded, particularly in the morning. The trees and air were much more relaxed than they are in Seattle. Was this a consequence of Detroit's world-famous decades-long population decline? Maybe in other parts of Detroit, but certainly not the one I stayed in during my Powerhouse residency, Hamtramck. It's a packed and busy place.
The mystery was finally solved on the third day of my stay. Hamtramck has no crows. The birds there are small and know how to sing. There is none of this screaming and cawing and grating and cracking and clicking that crows force on us all day, as if they are the sole reason a city exists. And who has not felt that the world was about to end upon hearing in the air or the trees so many crows going all out on some bird beef? This is what I heard the morning after I returned to Seattle, July 5. It woke me up from a jet-lagged dream. What was this about? Had a nearby star gone supernova? Was a comet about to slam into the earth? Had Yellowstone Park's super-volcano exploded? No. Just the usual crow drama to start the day.
And now for the point of this post.
On the fourth day of my visit, something occurred to me as I sat on the porch of the house of my residency (called Jar House, which draws all of its energy needs from the light of the sun). The air was almost hot, the local birds made their usual music, black squirrels darted up and down ghetto palms, Bangladeshi men waited for vans to take them to the working hours—and in that peaceful Hamtramck moment, I realized, as I thought about how crow sounds are horrible to human ears (indeed The Cornell Lab of Ornithology puts it too kindly: "The American Crow is not known for the beauty of its song"), about how humans might sound, not only to crows but to other animals in general. Crows do not sing. They only yell. We humans do sing (for example, the morning prayer as heard from a Hamtramck mosque), but we also talk a lot. What is it that other animals feel when hearing the sound of our voices? It must be very odd (if not frightening) because no other animal talks nearly as much as we do.
Two weeks after my crow-less time in Detroit, I chanced across an Atlantic article that had exactly this kicker: "Hearing people talk can terrify even top predators such as mountain lions, with consequences that ripple through entire ecosystems." The main point of that piece by Ed Yong is that most animals in wild places freak the fuck out when they hear the talking of humans. They stop whatever it is they are doing. They tremble. They flee. Talking is the sound of a super-predator. Even mountain lions know the game is up when it comes to this strangest of apes. This animal from America.
Yong writes:
In an English forest, the researchers played the sounds of various carnivores to local badgers. The badgers ignored the sounds of wolves entirely and were mildly concerned by the growls of wolves and bears. But they were profoundly disturbed by human speech, even the genteel tones of some BBC documentaries and a reading of The Wind in the Willows.[Also in] the Santa Cruz Mountains, they placed speakers at sites where mountain lions had killed large prey and were regularly returning to feed. When the cats approached, the team played either talking humans or croaking frogs. The frogs didn’t faze them. The human voices—including those of Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh—made them flee more than 80 percent of the time.
Recall the movie A Quiet Place. Recall how the aliens detected humans, their prey, by their voices. Recall how this forced humans into an awful world without spoken words. Now, rearrange the nature of the danger (the super-predator talks) and remove the humans and replace them with badgers and lions and bobcats and skunks and deer. We will call this horror movie A Talking Place. It's about the fear that most forest animals experience when garrulous hikers are heard.