The Listener Podcast

The first time I stepped into the Daintree Rainforest, I was completely blown away. Even getting there felt like an adventure. The road beyond the river was little more than a rough track, so an off road vehicle was essential. To reach the rainforest, you first crossed the Daintree River on a tiny cable ferry, leaving the modern world behind and entering one of the oldest living ecosystems on Eart...

Some places live in your imagination long before you ever set foot there. For me, one of those places was Slimbridge. As a young boy, I sat glued to the television watching Sir Peter Scott and dreaming of the vast flocks of geese and swans that gathered on the wetlands beside the River Severn. Even through the TV speaker, I could sense there was something magical about the sounds of that place. At...

Some of the most beautiful sounds I have recorded in Australia have come from frogs. At night, after heavy rain, the forest changes completely. The darkness fills with calls from hidden lives: the Green-lipped Frog calling from the rainforest canopy, Fletcher’s Frog buried in the wet leaf litter, the Sphagnum Frog hidden deep in mossy mountain bogs, and Lesueur’s Frog calling beside clear rocky st...

Some recordings stay with you for a lifetime. I traveled from the Kenyan coast at Mombasa to Buffalo Springs, a remarkable reserve in the shadow of Mount Kenya. Before sunrise, sitting quietly outside a rooftop tent, I listened as the landscape slowly came to life. A mysterious dove called constantly across the reserve, White-browed Sparrow joined the chorus, and hidden beneath it all were the voi...

Most people think it's an owl. It isn't. The first time I heard a Tawny Frogmouth was deep in Australia's Daintree Rainforest. Its haunting call rolled through the darkness like a distant engine, and when I finally found it, I was staring at what looked like a broken branch. Then it blinked. For this week's Patreon story, I share the remarkable tale of one of Australia's most extraordinary birds,...

There’s a bird in Scotland that never truly belonged there, yet somehow became part of the soul of the landscape. The Pheasant. Originally from Asia, introduced into the UK for one reason only… to be shot for sport. I lived for five years in Blair Atholl in the Scottish Highlands, where wealthy shooting parties would arrive every September 12th for the start of pheasant season. Men in tweed jacket...

Over a million seabirds. Albatross chicks scattered across the sand. Dolphins offshore. Monk seals resting on the beaches. One of the most alive places I have ever experienced. Those albatross chicks weren’t just being fed fish by their parents. They were being fed plastic. Bottle tops, lighters, fragments of our lives. Carried across the ocean and delivered to one of the most remote places on Ear...

There’s something about rain that most people miss. To many, it’s an inconvenience… something to escape from. To me, it’s music. Rain creates its own orchestra, each surface a different instrument. I’ve recorded it all over the world… in rainforests where the canopy turns it into layered percussion, in temperate forests where it softens into a gentle hush, on metal roofs where it becomes sharp and...

There are moments in life that quietly reshape you. Not with noise or drama… but with something subtle. Unexpected. For me, one of those moments came just outside the suburbs of Birmingham. I had travelled out toward the border of Wales searching for something I had only read about. A bird I had never heard before. The grasshopper warbler. When I finally heard it, I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t bi...

I’ve always loved eagles. Not just admired them… loved them. The first time I saw one was in Scotland in 1978, over Glencoe. A golden eagle riding the thermals above Rannoch Moor. It wasn’t flying… it was owning the sky. That moment never left me. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to record them across the world — from the reintroduced white-tailed eagles on the Isle of Rum, to bald eagles in Nort...

There was a time when you couldn’t look at the sky without hearing it. Not one bird… but many I remember lying on my back in a field as a boy, watching skylarks climb higher and higher until they disappeared from sight… but never from sound. The air itself was alive. A chorus with no beginning and no end. Today, that chorus is fading. In my lifetime, we’ve lost billions of birds. Not in some dista...

I have spent a lifetime listening. Not just hearing… but truly listening to the voice of the Earth. Because sound tells us things that our eyes cannot. A forest can still look whole… A river can still appear to flow… A landscape can seem untouched… But the truth is in the silence. The dipper no longer on the stream. The frogs missing from the marsh at dusk. The birds that once filled the forest… n...

I recently had an email questioning a bird I logged on Cornell’s eBird. The reviewer suggested the call I recorded was a Magnolia Warbler rather than the Red eyed Vireo I had listed. He explained that Magnolia Warblers can give a whiny call that sounds very similar to a vireo and also pointed out that Red eyed Vireos usually do not arrive in our coastal hammock habitat until late March. It was a t...

This is Martyn Stewart… with a life in sound from The Listening Planet. Recently I returned to England. Home. The place where everything began. But this time the journey was different. Someone had recommended me for an honour… an OBE. The Order of the British Empire. When I first heard the words, I honestly could not take it in. I kept thinking there must be some mistake. Awards like that are for...

Birds are not the only musicians in Earth’s orchestra. Amphibians, insects, mammals and marine life all play their part. But there is another section that moves me just as deeply. The sound of the planet itself. Wind. Rain. Ocean. Thunder. Geophony. I have recorded hurricanes named Andrew, Milton, Hellen and Dorian. Each one had its own personality. Its own voice. Standing in hurricane force winds...

When darkness falls most people think the world becomes quiet. But listen carefully. The night is speaking. Katydids in the trees. Crickets in the grass. Cicadas vibrating through the air. These are not background sounds. They are the living pulse of the planet, the voices of ecosystems in balance. For more than half a century I have listened to the natural world. I have heard thriving landscapes...

What is silence? For most people it means peace and quiet. But for me, silence is something very different. It is not the absence of sound, but the absence of life’s voices — the birds, the insects, the wild chorus we call biophony. True silence only exists in an anechoic chamber. What I seek instead is tranquility. A place where the Earth itself speaks. The rain falling through leaves. The wind m...

I want to share a small story with you. Many years ago, standing beside a quiet pond in the Wye Valley, I recorded my first reed warbler. A tiny bird hidden deep in the reeds, yet its voice filled the entire landscape with an endless cascade of buzzes, clicks, and song. I remember my tape running out while the bird continued, tireless, unstoppable. Even then, I knew I was witnessing something spec...

I live in the United States now — in Florida — though for more than twenty years Washington State was my home. The human voices around me carry a different accent from my British one, yet in the natural world, especially in bird song, I often hear echoes of where I came from. When I first arrived in America, it felt as though I had to learn a new language of sound. But it was not entirely unfamili...

I’ve realised over the years that you have to be a certain kind of person to do what I’ve done most of my life. I can sit for hours, barely moving, listening. Not thinking. Just being. People often ask what’s going through my head and never quite believe me when I say “nothing” — but that’s the truth. It’s a kind of meditation. I think of my mind as having boxes. A reading box. A gardening box. An...

In the cloud forests of Costa Rica, some voices don’t give themselves up easily. This little bird, the Scaled Antpitta , speaks in low, trembling notes that melt into the forest rather than rise above it. When I first heard it, I thought it was an owl. Only later did I learn I’d been listening to one of the most elusive voices of the forest floor. I was lucky enough to record it near the volcanic...

Sometimes I ask people to listen… to silence. That silence could be the Irish elk. That silence could be the dodo. Extinction doesn’t just remove an animal. It removes a voice from the planet forever. During my lifetime, I’ve recorded species whose sounds no longer exist in the wild. The Panamanian golden frog. The northern white rhino. Voices gone within a single generation. Wildlife populations...

Standing among an elephant seal colony is like stepping into another language. If a human made these sounds—deep belches, coughing roars, wet grunts—we’d probably turn away in embarrassment. On a Patagonian beach, they are the soundtrack of life itself. This is Península Valdés , on the coast of Argentina, the only place on a continental mainland where southern elephant seals come ashore in vast n...

I first began recording in Scotland in 1975, the same year the white-tailed eagle began its slow return. Before that, the bird had been hunted, poisoned and persecuted until it vanished from our skies. Its disappearance was not an accident of nature, but a choice made by people, one shot, one stolen egg, one poisoned carcass at a time. By the early twentieth century, the white-tailed eagle was gon...