Article

Recording Soundscapes After a Fire: It's for the Birds

Peace and quiet. This is why many people travel to national parks. But nature is louder than we might think. Dr. Jacob Job, a conservationist, communicator, and natural sounds recordist, visits national parks specifically for their sounds.

Dr. Job is passionate about the wild places that exist on our planet and our connections to them. His personal connection to nature began with his education in ecology and evolutionary biology and grew as he spent time in places like Rocky Mountain National Park where he worked to create a library of natural sound recordings. Dr. Job says listening to the sounds of nature is one of his greatest joys and through his work he can “capture nature’s finest compositions.”

a trail camera photo of a man in a hat with a backpack in a mountain meadow
Dr. Jacob Job captured by a trail camera at one of his study sites in the backcountry of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Jacob Job

Dr. Job began working in Rocky Mountain National Park in 2016 on a project with the NPS Natural Sounds and Night Skies program to create soundscapes of the park so that everyone could experience aspects of the landscape even if they can’t visit in person. The project allowed Dr. Job to spend time outdoors and explore the inherent beauty of nature.

Rocky’s landscape changed dramatically when a the East Troublesom Fire burned a large portion of the park in 2020. Many of the places where Dr. Job had been working, camping, and living looked—and sounded—entirely different. Imagine spending years living and working in a place, feeling connected to the land, and in a flash it’s totally altered.

The East Troublesome Fire was part of the most severe wildfire seasons the state of Colorado had ever seen. It caused major damage to much of the Arapahoe National Forest and into the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Dr. Job was devastated to see how deeply the fire damaged some of his favorite places. He spent some time reflecting and finally realized he could use his skills as an audio recordist to use the fire as a learning opportunity. He had been recording and mapping sounds for nearly a decade, but the fire inspired him to use sounds as a comparison tool. He began a new project looking at how the fire impacted the biodiversity in the park.

The goal of the project is to see how long it takes the burn scar to sound like the control sites outside the burn scar. And to understand how species communities shift in the years following the fire, especially bird communities. Birds are really helpful for this kind of study because they are vocal which means there is lots of sound data.

An Interview with Dr. Job

With Emma Stefanacci

I was excited to talk with Dr. Job because I have many personal connections to his work. I have lived in Colorado my whole life and consider Rocky Mountain National Park to be an extension of my backyard. I went to a school that highlighted the concepts of exploration and connection to nature, so I spent a lot of time in the mountains sitting in the not-so-quiet and reflecting on my connection to natural world.

I also rediscovered my love for birds and birdwatching during the height of the pandemic. Just thinking about how I would feel if I didn’t wake up to the robins outside my window, helped me understand how something that caused a change in the sound of a location could alter the entire feel of the place. With my own interests aligning with his work, and having read a little about this new project, I was ready to jump into a conversation with Dr. Job.

A black box with a small green screen sits strapped to the trunk of an aspen tree
Audio recorder at an unburned site.

Jacob Job

You had been doing sound recordings in the park for multiple years, but how did this particular project start?

When the Troublesome fire went across all those areas, I got sad that some of my favorite places were, not destroyed, but changed for my lifetime. So, I sat on it for a while and just thought “this is an opportunity to do what I do best which is to use sounds to understand the impact of the fire on the ecosystem in the park.”

That winter I came up with a plan to put audio recorders and camera traps at five sites inside the burn scar and five paired control sites outside the burn area. They were deployed and ran the whole year, and we collected a bunch of data, thousands of hours of audio recordings.

You started this project post fire because of previous connections to the park. How did you first get connected with the park in doing the audio recordings?

I mean, it's in my backyard. I used to live down in Fort Collins, so it was very convenient. And I’m emotionally connected to Rocky because it’s right there. I’ve worked there so much, and I’ve had some important life things happen up there.

But also like my previous position, I worked with the sound and light ecology team, which is a partnership between Colorado State University and the NPS Natural Sounds and Night Skies division.

We had all the connections to the Park Service already and so it was a pretty easy introduction and sell to Rocky Mountain National Park. I said, hey, I'm interested in doing audio recording in your park. I'm already affiliated since I was a partner with the Park Service.

How do you figure out what species are at the different sites? You’re an audio recordist, and you mentioned microphones and camera traps, but how do those identify species?

Traditionally, we use what’s called a “point count” method. What happens is somebody goes into the field; they go to a point that’s be predetermined and they stand there for 10 minutes and count all the species of birds they see and hear within a specific radius around them.

With audio recordings, we found that they equally lend themselves to the point count style analysis without having to be in the field. So, you can just go back and listen to the recordings. And that’s what I did. I listened to five days from June 1st to June 30th.

Each day we listen to a certain number of minutes, so I’m listening and I’m just jotting down the species that I’m hearing on those recordings. And what we found was that in any given one-minute point count, there were nearly twice as many species heard at the burn sites as at the non-burn sites.

Wait, you said that you were just listening to these audio recordings and were writing down the species that you heard?

That’s exactly it. I joke that it’s my superhero power that I can identify almost all birds by both sight and sound.

I did 20 randomly selected one-minute recordings per day for five days. And so, every one-minute recording I just jotted down a list of what species I heard in those recordings and then performed some analysis on those results.

  • Test Your Skills 1


    Can you identify this species?

    Audio Transcript

  • Test Your Skills 2


    Can you identify this species?

    Audio Transcript

  • Test Your Skills 3


    Can you distinguish two species in this clip? Can you identify them?

    Audio Transcript

A gray box sits strapped to the trunk of a bare tree. The surrounding ground is bare from fire damage
An audio recorder in a burned site.

Jacob Job

I love being out in national parks and wish I could make a living in them. What is it like to do research in a park?

I almost exclusively work on federal lands. It's sort of in the backcountry, so to speak, and it can be a challenge, especially when you're doing audio. If you're a photographer, you can just turn your lens, focus somewhere else where there aren't people, and no one will ever know. If you're an audio recorder, sound is everywhere -- aircraft, cars, people's voices, just whatever. And so, it can be really tough. And wherever I go, I have to either go at times where people aren't active early in the morning or late in the evening. Or I just have to go way far into the back country to get away from all that. Which creates a different relationship with the park/place.

Did you have hypotheses about differences between the burn scar and the control sites?

The first reports that came out of the fire were that it burned so hot, especially over the Green Mountain Trail, Green Mountain, and into Big Meadow, so the expectation was that if you burned that hot, if it destroys the soil, you’re not going to have much biodiversity leftover.

I originally thought we're not going to hear or see much of anything in these areas compared to the control sites for sure. But there’s always a part of me that says, “you never know what’s going to happen, so let’s just put these out there and discover what the new baseline is.”

Is that what you found? Not much of anything in the burn scar?

Actually, we found the same number of bird species at burn sites as we did in the control sites, so 40 species at each. The composition of species was different, so we had some species that were found at burn sites that we didn’t find at control sites and vice versa.

But it gets really interesting after that when we can start to look at how to these sites change over time.

Once you had this list of species at each site, how did you analyze the differences?

I listened to all of the recordings to identify the species, and then I asked which species were so much more prevalent at burn sites and which species were so much more prevalent at control sites. You start to look at not just overall numbers, but what does that community composition look like, and which species seem to differ between sites.

But some of the species, for instance dark eyed juncos, hermit thrush, mountain chickadee, ruby crowned kinglet, we basically didn’t find them. Not at all at burn sites. And so, when you dive into their biology, especially the chickadee and the kinglets, they live almost exclusively in the crowns of trees. Well, almost all the tree crowns were destroyed in the burn so there were none left.

So, you can start to tease apart maybe some of the explanations based on individual species biology which is really neat.

  • Test Your Skills 4


    Can you identify this species?

    Audio Transcript

  • Test Your Skills 5


    Can you identify this species? Can you tell what they're doing?

    Audio Transcript

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

You know most of my stuff, the work that I've done, no one would classify as research, and I probably would hesitate to classify as research too because what I try to do is communications. I try to get these recordings to connect people to places and species and try to get them to care about it for conservation efforts.

This project is different because there is a research aspect of it and I do enjoy that and I like research on my own terms, so it feels it feels like an adventure. It feels like I'm going out answering questions that are important. It's fun, you know, I get to be out there hauling all this equipment and spending days just deploying it and trying to piece together the story. And by the way, I'm doing this all by myself, all on my own time outside of work. I’m buying, carrying, and setting up all the equipment and then analyzing the results in my bedroom/home office. And so, it's really a passion project at this point.

Tags

Rocky Mountain National Park

Last updated: April 18, 2023