Getting to Hear Nature in Your Backyard: Introducing Delta

Connecting to nature puts us in our place. We think we are stewards of the planet, but the recent global pandemic, past ones, and now climate change, tell us we aren’t.

There are people who have been revealing nature to all of us since early in the 20th century.  National Geographic, the BBC, the Smithsonian, and America’s PBS have given us images and programs that show the natural world up close. These images are accompanied by sound. But sound alone has the power to reveal so much more than being the background to film. Think about how much nature is nocturnal. You don’t see the owls hooting in the dark of night.

That’s where Topher White, who founded the Rainforest Connection (RC) almost a decade ago, comes in. Topher has been building a network of listening posts in the world’s rainforests. The ears he put in trees have come from donated cell phones powered by solar panels. Through these devices, RC has picked up the sounds of elephants making their way through forest trails in Africa, monkey chatter, tree frogs, the cacophony of flocks of birds settling in for the night, and more. RC brings the sound of wind rustling through forests and the pitter-patter of raindrops on leaves. With the RC app from Apple and Google online stores, you can listen from anywhere. With this app, we get acoustically closer to the natural worlds of Africa, South Asia, and Central and South America.

Now, Topher wants to give us the means to listen to sounds coming from backyards, parks, and campsites. These are sounds of nature often drowned out by urban noise. And from my many walks outdoors, it increasingly is clear to me that many of us are shutting out nature by wearing earbuds, listening to streamed music or podcasts, and talking on cell phones. The bird song, the chucking of squirrels and the chatter of chipmunks during the day, and the mewing of skunks or the sounds of pesky raccoons in their nighttime forays through urban neighbourhoods are seldom heard. Nor are people hearing the chirping of crickets, the thrumming of cicadas, or the buzzing of bees.

Topher’s latest undertaking, called Squibbon, can change this. A new listening device and app called Delta can allow us to hear the surrounding micro-wilderness whether it is a backyard, park, conservation area or campsite. Delta is a home wilderness navigator. It is made of brushed aluminum and looks very much like a triangular-shaped UFO. It has three state-of-the-art, built-in microphones and built-in WiFi. It can detect even the faintest sounds within and beyond normal human auditory range. It can track sounds from the smallest creatures. You can set it up in the backyard. It’s portable to fit in a backup to take on a picnic. Or at a campsite, it can be set up at the perimeter to alert you to the sounds of an approaching bear, wolf, or coyote.

Delta will become available with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign beginning on March 21st. You will be able to order the device and download the app in time for the 53rd celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 2023.

Topher has a decade of experience deploying networked listening devices in more than 35 countries. When he and I caught up over Zoom in the last couple of weeks, he talked about one of the challenges many RC subscribers experience trying to understand what they are hearing from the enormous catalogue of recorded sounds from around the world. That’s because most of us are unfamiliar with these sounds other than those added to backgrounds in movies.

Delta will capture sounds we seldom hear but may be more familiar to us. Much of the sounds of wildlife we never hear because so much of it happens after dark in cities. Now we will be able to listen to what we miss using the Delta cellphone app. I asked Topher if I could put a Delta on the balcony of our condo apartment. Because Delta filters out city noises from traffic, construction, and the like, it would be interesting to see what gets recorded.

For the past eight years, we have been living next to a cemetery-arboretum in the heart of the city. It is connected to ravines and brings coyotes, deer, foxes, and many small animals into close proximity. My wife’s brother and sister-in-law also live in this neighbourhood and their backyard is adjacent to the cemetery. They have described hearing the cries of coyotes in the night coming from the cemetery grounds. Talk about an urban call of the wild.

Topher and I have promised to stay connected to have future conversations about Delta and how it gets used by urban and rural users. His academic background is in physics. But the work he has done includes STEM education initiatives with the Los Angeles school system (TechCrunch, PRNewswire), live whale detection in Canada, eco-soundscape projects in Indonesia, and an amazing multimedia feature on indigenous stewardship in Brazil. And for this coming Earth Day, he is planning a special celebration called the Global Backyard Listening Party for the Planet to share sounds captured by Delta from the backyards of celebrities around the world.

He told me that for him Delta is not just the launch of a new piece of hardware but also about stories that will unfold as these listening posts are deployed in backyards around the world. When a fox walks through a backyard, or crows congregate in nearby trees, or a bumblebee transits the garden humming from flower to flower, these events will lead to stories to be shared with children, opening a door to nature and bringing it closer to them.