Listening to Birds After the East Troublesome Fire

People come to national parks for peace and quiet, yet nature is louder than we tend to think. Dr. Jacob Job, a conservationist, science communicator and natural sounds recordist, visits parks specifically to record them.

His connection to nature grew from studying ecology and evolutionary biology, and from time spent in places like Rocky Mountain National Park, where he built a library of natural sound recordings. Listening to nature, he says, is one of his greatest joys, and his work lets him capture nature's finest compositions.

A changed landscape

Job began working in the park in 2016, on a project with the NPS Natural Sounds and Night Skies program to record the park's soundscapes so people could experience it even without visiting.

In 2020 the East Troublesome Fire, part of the most severe wildfire season Colorado had ever seen, did major damage to much of the Arapaho National Forest and burned into the west side of the park. Many places where Job had worked, camped and lived now looked, and sounded, entirely different.

He was devastated to see favorite places changed for his lifetime. After some reflection, he saw a chance to use what he does best. He had been recording and mapping sounds for nearly a decade; now he would use sound to compare burned and unburned land and learn how the fire affected the park's biodiversity. The questions: how long will the burn scar take to sound like the unburned land, and how do communities of species, especially birds, shift in the years after a fire? Birds suit the work because they are vocal, which means plenty of sound data.

The study

That winter Job planned the study, and it ran for a full year:

• Sites: five inside the burn scar and five paired control sites outside it, each with an audio recorder and a camera trap.
• Data: thousands of hours of recordings.
• Counting birds by ear: the traditional point count has an observer stand at a set spot for 10 minutes and count every bird seen or heard within a set radius. Recordings allow the same count without being in the field. Job listened to 20 randomly chosen one-minute recordings a day on five days in June, noting every species he heard. He jokes that identifying almost any bird by sight or sound is his superpower.

Job came to the park through his earlier job with the sound and light ecology team, a partnership between Colorado State University and the NPS Natural Sounds and Night Skies division, and through living nearby in Fort Collins. The new project, though, was his own, done on his own time: he bought, carried and set up the equipment himself and analyzed the results from home.

What he heard

Early reports said the fire burned very hot, especially over the Green Mountain Trail, Green Mountain and into Big Meadow. Job expected soil damage and little biodiversity, and thought the burned sites would be much quieter than the controls, though part of him wanted simply to find out what the new baseline was.

• Same number, different birds. Burned and control sites each had 40 bird species, but the mix differed: some species turned up only at burned sites, others only at control sites.
• More species per minute in the burn. In any one-minute count, nearly twice as many species were heard at burned sites as at unburned ones.
• Missing canopy birds. Dark-eyed juncos, hermit thrushes, mountain chickadees and ruby-crowned kinglets were essentially absent from the burned sites. Chickadees and kinglets live almost entirely in tree crowns, and nearly all the crowns there had burned.
• Woodpeckers could be heard pecking on burned trees.

Looking at each species' biology this way helps explain why communities differ, and the real interest, Job says, lies in how these sites change over time.

Recording in a park

Job works almost entirely on federal land, and sound makes it hard. A photographer can simply point the lens away from people; a sound recordist picks up aircraft, cars and voices everywhere. He works early in the morning or late in the evening, or goes deep into the backcountry, which creates a different relationship with a place.

Most of his work, he says, is communication rather than research: recordings meant to connect people to places and species so they will care about conserving them. This project added research, and he enjoys it, describing it as an adventure and a passion project.

Sources

• National Park Service, Rocky Mountain National Park, "Recording Soundscapes After a Fire: It's for the Birds," with an interview by Emma Stefanacci: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/recording-soundscapes-after-a-fire.htm
• The NPS page includes audio clips of the birds recorded; its photographs, credited to Jacob Job, are not reproduced here.
• The article spells the fire both "Troublesom" and "Troublesome" and the forest "Arapahoe"; this page uses "East Troublesome" and "Arapaho." Its quiz labels two clips as one species and gives the other as the answer, so the quiz is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.