The Birds Are Singing, but Not for Me

Animal sounds are my connection to the changing seasons. Every week, a new voice appears or fades. Early winter arrives with the chip of juncos. The chitter of nestling bluebirds signals the onset of summer, closely followed by the first cicadas.

This year, though, the yearly cycle was missing a voice. In that absence, I learned something about my creeping deafness and, beyond, the Faustian bargains that our ancestors struck with evolution.

Where I live in the Southeast, late spring is marked by the songs of blackpoll warblers, tiny black-and-white birds migrating from South America to the boreal forests of Canada where they breed. They’re here for a week just as the school year ends and tomato-planting season begins, a joyful time. This year, I heard none. My partner, though, could hear their high-pitched song and pointed the birds out as they flitted in the treetops.

The sonic erasure felt deeply unsettling. I could hear other everyday sounds — passing cars, cardinals whistling, neighborhood kids at play — but the blackpoll’s song was gone.

Graphs from my audiologist show hearing loss across all sound frequencies, but especially for high sounds, so I was expecting this moment. Still, the loss of blackpoll warblers hit me hard. I had looked forward all winter to hearing them and then … nothing. Now, in summer, I notice other gaps in the soundscape, especially the high, raspy thrumming of the meadow katydids. This is a strange grief: The songs are there, but not for me. I miss them.

As a biologist fascinated with sound, I’ve tried to protect my ears, using earplugs around power tools and at loud concerts. Yet my hearing loss is now worse than most of my cohort of friends in their mid-50s, a quirk of my genes. I’m not alone. The National Institutes of Health reports that approximately 15 percent of Americans over the age of 18 report some trouble hearing. Among those older than 75, nearly half do.