"40% of the habitats that I've recorded have been forever silenced, gone fully extinct or altered"

[n2doc]

Lifelong listener fears the sound of nature's silence
He has recorded call of the wild for decades, but worries earth's music will soon be lost
Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer
Sunday, May 20, 2007

For almost 40 years, Bernie Krause has been hearing and recording the sounds of nature, quiet moments interrupted only by grunts of sea lions, yips of coyotes and rumbling of glaciers.
Krause has captured a stereophonic symphony of wolf packs in northern Ontario, Darwin finches in the Galapagos, snapping shrimp on Maui coral reefs, and a distant storm in Belize.
And for the past four days, he has been playing his underwater recordings of feeding humpbacks to lure two misguided whales back to the ocean -- just as he enticed Humphrey, another stray humpback, to follow a boat 50 miles out of the delta 12 years ago.
Krause collects "wild soundscapes" and has amassed the largest archive in the world: some 1,100 different habitats with 15,000 separate animal sounds in 3,500 hours.
"Forty percent of the habitats that I've recorded have been forever silenced, gone fully extinct or are hopelessly altered," Krause said in an interview in his studio earlier this month.

It's a race for Krause, a mission to document Earth's nonhuman sounds before they're compromised or lost forever as timber companies cut old-growth forests and pave over wildlands. He also sees civilization encroaching on wilderness with aircraft, booming sound systems and generators, degrading the quality of the environment. If he can preserve the rich sounds of nature, perhaps he will inspire others to protect it, he says.

more:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/20/MNGB5PUAL51.DTL

mp3 files of his recotdings at link...

"I can't imagine living without the divine music of the natural world."