Shreya: The fact that you can hear these slight differences, and they say so much about the people’s behavior and the landscape and you don’t necessarily need to see the birds to be able to figure out their relationship with the landscape.

That was quite mind blowing to me.

Mike: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your cohost Mike DiGirolamo bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists, working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But for scientists and conservationists to understand the world around us, and the many animals that inhabit it, visuals only tell one part of the story. There’s a lot more than meets the eye. Enter the emerging field of bioacoustics, which is the collection, and the study of the sounds animals make. My guest today has spent the past few months reporting on this topic. Shreya Dasgupta is the Newswire editor for Mongabay and an audio journalist. In our conversation, she speaks with me about this developing science and its application in India.

She produced a three-part podcast mini-series about it in collaboration with Mongabay India, senior digital editor, Kartik Chandramouli. They travel around India speaking with researchers who study the sounds of bats, elephants, sarus cranes, and many other animals. You get to hear a couple of SREs favorites in this conversation. We talk about how beautiful, mysterious, and surprising these sounds can be, if you aren’t accustomed to hearing them. They contain the stories life, and communication of species that in urbanized life, we sometimes forget are even there. And even researchers can forget they’re there. That’s why this field is so important for documenting species presence. Understanding them. And aiding conservation efforts.

Shreya, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. How are you?

Shreya: I’m very well. Thank you for having me here. Very happy to be here.

Mike: Absolutely. Thank you for joining us. And where are you joining us from?

Shreya: So, I’m based in Bangalore in South India.

Mike: And you actually traveled for the podcast series that we’re going to talk about today and did some research around Bangalore. Correct?

Shreya: Yes. So, the podcast series that we will talk about, Wild Frequencies. So, I had the opportunity to travel couple of different places, including an institute in Bangalore itself and also in Mumbai where my co-host is based and I’m very excited to talk about it.

Mike: And we were going to get to it.

What Is the New ‘Newswire’ Service at Mongabay?

Mike: The first thing I want to address though, is that you’re also our newswire editor here at the global newsroom, you know, and that’s a new role here at Mongabay. So, can you tell our audience what is the Newswire service that we have?

Shreya: So, I’d like to start by saying that my relationship with Mongabay goes long way back. I was an intern with Mongabay in 2013. That’s when I started my journalism career, you could say. So, I’ve been working with them on and off for a really long time. I was an intern, I was a news fellow, then I was a staff writer for a bit, then I went freelance again.

And in May this year, I have returned as in a new role of a Newswire editor. And so, the Newswire desk is a brand new vertical that Mongabay has just launched. It focuses exclusively on short form news. So very short news, 300 – 500 words only. And it’s basically to–the goal is to become a timely go to source of information on all things environment, tropical forest, ocean, wildlife conservation news, to become that timely go to source of information for a general audience.

And that general audience can then be funneled back into Mongabay’s more in depth, you know, nuanced reporting that we are known for.

Mike: Right. We’ve produced so many long form feature stories, so it’s really exciting to have this, new format that’s I don’t know if “digestible” is the right word here, but it’s, shorter, it’s easier to read in a quicker period of time. But it’s a lot of work though.

Like how many, like, how many stories are we producing on that a day?

Shreya: Right now, about three, but the goal is to produce about eight to ten stories a day. That’s when we have a bigger team. So right now, there are two editors. So, there’s Bobby Bascomb, who’s based in Costa Rica. And then I’m based in Bangalore. And then we’re hiring a bunch of writers/reporters who will exclusively write short form news for us.

And these are people who have experience in wide reporting. So, they know how to produce short, quick factually accurate news in short turnaround times. yeah. So, the goal is to produce eight to 10 stories per day. And these will be, as you said short digestible format of news that people can consume quickly, move on to the next one.

And if something interests them, then those stories will lead the readers to, you know, more in depth reporting that they can explore.

Mike: And I think it’s worth mentioning here that we have a new website design at Mongabay. likely listeners have noticed by now that we have a new look. So, you can find the Newswire stories under the heading “shorts.” Just go to the website and you’ll see different sections for different formats such as podcasts and video.

There’s also one for shorts and that’s where you can access these new stories. But anyway, that, that is not all you’ve been working on.

What is Wild Frequencies?

Mike: We’re primarily here to talk today about your podcast mini-series, which we alluded to at the top of the show, Wild Frequencies.

let’s just go ahead. In a nutshell, what’s this podcast about?

Shreya: Yeah, Wild Frequencies is about sounds that animals produce. The idea is that there are researchers in India who use bioacoustics, which is an emerging science, to study animals different, many different kinds of animals through the sounds that they produce. So not visually, but through sounds.

And the idea of the podcast was to do three episodes that look at different aspects of how researchers use bioacoustics to understand wildlife and use that for wildlife conservation which is the end goal.

Mike: And it’s a three part, mini-series (I would like to remind folks) and it’s produced by the India bureau. So, it’s on the Everything Environment feed by Mongabay India. If you use Apple podcasts, you can also find it under our podcast channel but it’s also on Spotify under Everything Environment by Mongabay India, and you’ll find it there, but this is a really, cool series.

And, other than the fact that it has these amazing animal sounds, it has a really awesome soundtrack from Abhijit Shylanath. And he did a really fantastic job editing and doing the sound design, but I also heard him say that he composed the music. correct?

Shreya: Yes, so first there’s Kartik Chandramouli who is the senior digital editor at Mongabay India. So, he’s the one who reached out to me to do this podcast series and so he’s my co-host, co-researcher, key co-reporter and then we have Abhijit Shylanath who is also based in Bangalore and he’s a music composer. He has composed music for movies, ads games, and also a podcast that I ran independently before joining Mongabay.

he’s very good. He’s also an avid podcast listener. So, he understands you know, how the music in podcasts, what works for listeners, what doesn’t work, sound design. And so yeah, so he, Kartik and I did the recordings in the field in the studio and remotely. And Abhijit then put everything together.

He did the original some of, a lot of it is original music that he composed. Including the initial music that you hear after we introduce the podcast in each episode and the sound design. A lot of it is original music. A lot of the sounds are from the researchers themselves. So, he’s combined all of that together to really breathe life into the episodes.

Mike: Yeah. and it does it in a really fantastic way. And that is so cool to hear. I myself really struggle with doing soundtracks. it is really hard to do. And so having a composer. Who, you know, really knows their stuff, like Abhijit, that, that’s, incredible to have on hand. He did a great job.

Going a Little Batty

Mike: And we also have a couple of sounds to play in this conversation from some of the animals, that you heard. we’re gonna go ahead and play that first sound right now.

Shreya, Kartik and Rohit listen to a couple Bat Sounds: Okay, oops.

Sounds like they’re clapping. So, they’re extremely active and I think they’re, obviously, you know, for, oh, that’s a different species. There’s a smaller species calling at about 40 kilohertz. Okay, that’s interesting. Was that a pipistrelle? Correct. So, I’m guessing this is the, Indian pipistrelle, whereas the one calling at above 50 was a least pipistrelle, the Indian pygmy bat.

Mike: And Shreya, what is this sound that we just heard here? What, animal is this?

Shreya: Yeah, so I’ll give you some context. This was the first interview we did for this podcast mini-series. There’s a researcher, Dr. Rohit Chakravarti, who studies bats and bats the smaller bats, the microbats, they they echolocate using ultrasonic sounds and that is the sound that they use to identify bats.

So, they don’t do it visually as much as they do it using sounds. So, the episode, the first episode focuses on how researchers ID and find species around. through their sounds Rohit lives in Bangalore, and we reached out to him and he suggested that we meet at the Indian Institute of Science, or IISc.

It’s a beautiful campus within Bangalore which is, you know, very densely populated otherwise. And inside IISc he promised us that we would go on a bat walk. After the interview where we would definitely see or at least hear a lot of bats. And we did. So, after the interview, so he took us through how bats vocalize how their ultrasound, ultrasonic clicks work, you know, how they use it to navigate the airspace above us and how they find insects to eat and figure out where they are. All that was great, but once he started you know, walking through the campus and he had the bat detector out…

Bat Detector!: DUN DUN

Shreya: …and the first, you know, the evening set, the sun went down, and you could see this swarm of tiny bats start flying overhead and then his bat detector started going off and that’s what you hear.

And it was very cool to see that you can’t hear the ultrasound, but you can see all that in the bat detector as graphs or as spectrograms as they are called. And the fact that you could just look at these graphs and say what species of bat it is. Because if you just look up, they all seem the same.

They’re tiny and they’re flying in similar manner. And they all just seem the same, but you can see here the bat detector go off…

Bat Detector!: DUN

Shreya: …and produce different kinds of sounds. And each stands for a different bat. So that was very cool to see.

Mike: That, that part of the episode is, I don’t want to spoil it for folks, just go listen to it. It’s great. But why you’ve mentioned that this is your, favorite sound that you heard in the series. So why is it your favorite?

Shreya: This is one of the favorites, I think, because this was the first interview we were doing and this, just, you know, opened up, at least my mind, to the fact that there’s just so much happening in the world around us in frequencies that we can hear and in frequencies that are beyond our hearing range.

And the fact that scientists, researchers have figured out how to listen to these sounds that we can’t otherwise hear, but we can hear through devices that they have built.

Mike: And so, that brings up a really good question because there’s you, like you mentioned, like you didn’t know that, that there was so much diversity in the species until you like saw them pop up on the bat detector there…

Bat Detector!: DUN DUN

Mike: …why is that so important? Like why is that so important for researchers to understand? How is that information used for conservation and reducing, the problems that we see in conservation?

Shreya: Yeah. So, I think for the first step of conservation is to figure out what is there around us. So that is the aim of most researchers to figure out what bats are around us in the first place. And to do that, you could sit and, you know, wait for bats, catch them in nets and ID them. So that’s a whole process that you could go through but that takes a lot of time money effort but if you listen to bats and figure out ID species that are around you, can–because bats, eat insects they are pollinators, they you know have a lot of ecosystem services that they provide and if you don’t know what is around you you know the fact that you start cutting down trees or plant trees that are not native in a city–so unless you know what animals are around you and how they interact with the environment that is within your cities or around you –you wouldn’t be able to do any conservation.

So that’s the first step of conservation is to find and identify and also count what is around you.

Mike: Yeah. like, you mentioned, like you said, I can’t remember how you phrased this in the podcast, but it was like you didn’t know that all those bats flying overhead represented, I don’t know how many species it was, six, eight, 10 of them? Like if researchers don’t know that, then you don’t know what you’re losing if that area gets devastated.

Shreya: Yep. Yeah, so I am a novice. I didn’t know much about bats. And for me, you know, it’s either a small bat or a large bat. So that’s, that, that has been my bat identifying skill. Haha.

Mike: Haha. It’s mine too. So don’t feel bad. Yeah.

Shreya: Yeah. And I asked Rohit that as well, you know, what would he, as a bat researcher, what would he have not known if he didn’t have this device? And for him, it was the same that he used to see these different, he would identify bats based on the size. So, there’s a small bat on this tree. There’s a medium sized bat on that tree.

And there is a large bat that flies, you know, the flying foxes or the fruit eating bats that fly that you can see more easily and identify. But it’s only when he got the bat detector that he started seeing that the small bat is actually some three or four different species within Bangalore. And he did not know that despite, you know, being in this field initially. And now, of course, he knows that.

Mike: Right. And that’s, that’s huge that’s huge to know. It surprised me to learn that the larger bats don’t, at least they don’t rely on echolocation. Where I live in, the city, we have these ginormous flying foxes. They are huge. And I guess they don’t, rely on echolocation, which is something that really surprised me.

I was going to ask you. What was one of the most surprising things that you learned in this series? Without giving too much away, of course.

Shreya: Yeah, I think there are a few things there’s certain calls that I did not know that animals produce, when we were reporting for the second episode which features Asian elephants in this park Kaziranga National Park in East India. And I, of course, elephants, you know that elephants trumpet and you know about rumbles a little bit, but they also have these very strange bird like sounds that they produce in certain situations so which was very surprising and the fact that Kartik and I, went on a safari, a jeep safari in the park because we just wanted to see the park before we interviewed the researchers and We actually heard some of those sounds and initially we did not know who was producing them and then we saw that oh, it’s an elephant and he seems agitated by the tourist vehicles and then we asked the researcher and she explained and yeah I would urge you to listen to the episode to find out more about this, but that was very surprising for me then another thing was to to figure out that people are not just able to identify species using the sounds they produce, but they are also now counting animals, you know counting population estimating their population and densities using the sounds that they produce which we talk about in the first episode including using you know, for this happens for very certain marine animals and also for Indian wolves, so that was very surprising for me

Rhett: Hi, this is Rhett Butler, the founder and CEO of Mongabay. Please join me for a special in-person event with Jane Goodall to celebrate her 90th birthday and Mangabeys 25th birthday. The event will be hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California on September 16th, 2024 in San Francisco. You can also join virtually from anywhere. Find the link in the show notes for tickets, and use the promo code C1PARTNER one word, all letters uppercase for $10 off. I hope you can join us for this exciting conversation with my friend Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most iconic conservationists.

The Complicated Lives of Sarus Cranes

Mike: Yeah. there’s a lot of stuff in this episode that I learned, but that’s really interesting to hear you say that. That said, we should listen to our second sound, so let’s go ahead and play that second sound.

(Sarus crane sounds)

Mike: Okay. So, what are we listening to here, Shreya?

Shreya: So, we basically listening to this unison call between a male and a female sarus crane. So, it’s a giant bird. It’s a massive bird that lives in, in duos. So, it’s always a couple, a breeding couple that lives in farmlands of India. So, they don’t live in forests. You know, they don’t, they’re massive, but six, about six feet, five 11.

So, they’re very tall birds and they have these very, loud calls. And you’ll hear them in the third episode. And these sarus cranes are, live quite happily with the farmers. So, the farmers don’t have a problem with the sarus cranes living on their farms and the sarus cranes don’t have a problem with the farmers and it’s, a weirdly very positive relationship that they have.

And there are certain things that, you know, the sound seems very loud and, in your face, and as lay people, you wouldn’t really know what is happening. But when Gopi Sundar, the researcher we spoke to about this, and he has been studying sarus cranes for several decades now, and he has noticed, you know, changes in how, in, in their sounds based on because they live on farms and we humans are constantly modifying our farmlands and the areas that form this sort of wetland farmland complexes, right?

So, there are farms one day, there are farms, the farms disappear the next day, there are roads or there are electric lines or something keeps changing in their habitats. And these sarus cranes are constantly evolving and adapting. And you can hear some of their adaptations and responses in the calls that they make.

And they have been able, they have been able to figure this out by analyzing the calls. So, the call that you heard is a unison call that a male and female sing together. In some places they have found that they call a third bird in. And then that become becomes a triet, which is a very odd thing to happen in the crane world.

It’s they hire a nanny to take care of the chick and you know the fact that you can listen to you don’t need to see the birds, but if you listen to and you find that it’s a triet and not a duet you can then have some understanding of the habitat that they might be living in because they call a nanny only when the sort of the territory quality is poor. So, it gives you clues about where they live, you know, if there is hunting going on, they do certain things to their calls.

If there are electric lines, they do certain modifications to their calls. And it’s, you know, you can understand a lot about the landscape and the people by listening to these birds.

Mike: That’s wild. They, that’s really wild. why do you like this one? Why is it one of your favorites?

Shreya: I think because to me, when I used to hear a sarus crane call, it just seemed very loud noise and the fact that there’s just so much going on and that researchers have figured out that the differences, the slight differences in their calls in different parts of India and sarus cranes are also found in Australia, by the way and the fact that you can hear these slight differences and they say so much about the people’s behavior and the landscape and you don’t necessarily need to see the birds to be able to figure out their relationship with the landscape.

That was quite mind blowing to me.

Mike: Right. Like it’s like language. It’s like little nuances in the way they’re adjusting it. Tells you a lot about what they’re communicating to one another.

Shreya: Exactly.

Animal ‘Societies’ We Don’t Normally Hear in Cities

Mike: That…yeah. kind of blows my mind to hear that they hail childcare.

Shreya: Haha. Yes.

Mike: That’s quite handy. So, you alluded to this earlier and it’s actually kind of an overall question I have for you. You know, we live. We’re living in an increasingly urbanized world where a lot of us, we don’t, see or hear all these sounds and this vast biodiversity. So, I think it can be fairly easy for us to forget that there’s like entire, you know, in essence societies of living, breathing, feeling, animals with complex emotional lives all around us that we, just don’t see.

And it, for me, when I have gone into the field, it just hits me in the face. Like I feel like I’m in another world. I felt it when I was hiking through the mountains in West Papua. I felt it when I was. I didn’t get to go there, of course, but I was, , listening to elephant sounds in the Central African Republic for a podcast episode, and it just was, It shocked me.

And I was just curious, like if you felt the same way you know, what was that experience like for you? You know, what was it like to, , feel and hear those complex communities come to life?

Shreya: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It completely has changed how I experience the environment around me, whether it’s just outside my home or, you know, in a forest. For example, while reporting for the second episode when we went on the safari in Kaziranga National Park, all we were hoping to do was to be able to see elephants, just to get context on, you know, where elephants are, how they live inside, this protected area, just to get some color and understanding of this world.

But then, and our idea of elephant sounds at the time was trumpets and rumbles, but then We went into the forest, we saw elephants and, you know, they started producing sounds that we had not anticipated at all. And so, there were no trumpets, but there were all these different, sounds like I mentioned that we then had to ask Dr. Seema Lokhandwala what those meant and what behaviors they represented. And the next time I went to a park later after reporting for this episode and I saw elephants again, and I saw, I heard some of those calls. I could now you know, like she said, sounds help you complete the story or the picture, you know, visuals are not enough.

our understanding of smells is not quite there, but at least with visuals and sounds now you have a much deeper understanding of the world around you when you experience the world very differently the same goes for crickets I had no idea that male crickets make all these different sounds in so many different contexts and that they have so many different meanings to me they’re just loud noise, but when I was reporting for the second episode, it, now when I go out there and I hear crickets you know, I can see the differences in their frequencies and tempo and you can figure out if there are a couple of different cricket sounds, you start paying attention to those and yeah, it’s been amazing.

Mike: The diversity of the cricket sounds also surprised me. And so I’m like, that’s in the back of my head now, when I think about, what sounds crickets are making. But yeah, it’s I can’t emphasize enough just how, crazy it is to think about complexity of all these sounds and how they change depending on the time of day and, what that means.

And that’s just something I think that in an urbanized life, we just don’t think about a ton. That said you’ve done really awesome work on this series. I really encourage people to go check it out. All three episodes are now out. But Shreya, if you were to, cause you’re a podcast master yourself.

If you were to go do another podcast season what’s something nature related that you would want to tackle in a new series?

Shreya: Oh, that’s a really tough one. I would be very interested in understanding how different communities. So, we’ve, in this series, we’ve looked at how different researchers use all these technologies acoustic technologies. But I’m very interested in also, stories about how communities themselves use technologies to find what is around them and, you know, figure out how to live with those non-human species around them.

And there is a lot of stuff happening that doesn’t get captured that deeply. And I think there’s a lot of scope in terms of sound design and as well as storytelling in, in that.

Mike: And you’re talking about in your community where you live right now, correct?

Shreya: So, in local communities, Indigenous communities, wherever, yeah, across India.

Mike: Yeah. That would be interesting to see.

Shreya: Yeah, I think one thing that we did not get to explore in the podcast series, because bioacoustics is fairly new in India and people are still figuring it out. it’s being used mostly, you know, in studies that people are trying to ID species or count species or understand animal behavior and all of that.

So, we haven’t moved to the stage where people are using bioacoustics for conservation per se, but that will come. Some of the application is still there. So, one thing that I would have really liked to explore is how, you know, human noise sort of affects animal sounds. all the noise that we produce all the traffic, all the conversations, and there’s just nonstop noise around us.

Because even when we were trying to interview the researchers in the field, it was really hard to find quiet places spaces that, you know, are not interrupted by cats and goats and cows and people and planes and trains. So if that is the challenge that I faced while interviewing, I can only imagine how, you know, our human noise sort of affects animal sounds and how that then affects animal communication. So that is one thing that I would have loved to explore and maybe I will explore later.

Mike: That would be really interesting to dive into particularly around major urban centers, like how that affects how that affects wildlife. I can’t imagine, in a super positive way. but it would be really interesting to look into that.

Shreya: Well, I think even if it’s not positive, or negative, I think animals adapt, some animals at least adapt so well and we really haven’t comprehended how they adapt and sometimes, you know, there are these adaptations in their calls, they produce different calls, slightly different songs, but if you just take the case of birds, the same species, whether it’s in, in a, on the outskirts of Bangalore versus inside Bangalore, they might be producing slightly different songs and this has been shown in other places, not in Bangalore. So, all those things would be very interesting to see how noise affects their communication, animal communication.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Birds are a big one. Especially where I live. I would be curious to know what the variations in their calls mean. And just get a better understanding of that. That would be, wild. Well, Shreya, it has been a pleasure speaking with you.

And once again, really fantastic job on this. You and Kartik really put together a great series.

Shreya: Thank you so much. I’d like to give a shout out to Mongabay India for supporting this project because the travel, the reporting, the research took a really long time and was very intensive and very grateful for the support.

Mike: Absolutely. Mongabay, India, our bureau in India, you do fantastic work.

Shreya: Yeah.

Mike: All right. Thanks Shreya.

Shreya: Thank you, Mike.

Credits

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