Photographing a birdsong

Well, hello! It’s been a minute. I’ve decided to merge more my art activities into these ecological writings because I’m beginning to appreciate how much they compliment each other, and plus, I’ve been wanting to keep an in-depth record of my process for a while.

I haven’t had much time to make art this year because of school, new jobs, and some health things. In May, I received a diagnosis for a disease called Cholesteatoma which is a benign lump in my middle ear that is slowly eroding my tiny ear bones. The news was hard to take at first because I was told I needed multiple surgeries and would end up with permanent loss of hearing in one ear, potential facial paralysis, and loss of taste. It was a fight to even get a CT scan to see the extent of the disease because hospitals were (and still are) so backlogged from the pandemic. And of course, I spent some time Googling the disease online, which only caused me to read depressing, anecdotal cases and prison-stare at the ceiling at night.

Cholesteatoma hasn’t cropped up in the mainstream very much. Interestingly though, some research suggests Oscar Wilde died from complications of Cholesteatoma, which is damn unlucky. I’m counting my blessings that I live in 2022 with free healthcare and not in some sepulchral hotel in 1900’s Paris, drinking four litres of wine (probably) a day in social exile.

Although writing this out helps purge my brain, it also serves to add context to my next photographic project. The treacle July heat is helping to tease some ideas from this summer’s fieldwork experiences, along with a motivation to turn my photographic practice a little more sustainable. While I was nest-searching in northern BC, I was anxious about being too deaf to hear bird songs and alarm ‘chips’ to help locate and ID nests. Three bird species – the orange-crowned warbler, the brown-eyed junco, and the chipping sparrow - have similar light, trilling songs like tiny tambourines. Each call has a very slight difference to the other, so trying to ID the bird when it’s hidden in dense mid-canopy vegetation is tricky. Birds also tell us so much about the surrounding habitat and other wildlife, so not being able to hear their songs and calls is like taking away a rung from a ladder.

There is a kind of grief when parts of your body lose dexterity, and living in the moment becomes burdensome and tinged with anxiety. I’ve become fixated on the behaviour of sound – it’s shape, presence, and feeling – perhaps as an unconscious need to make sense of the perception that is slowly fizzling out, born from an irrational fear of the world going completely silent. I had surgery a week ago and some hearing has started to come back a tiny bit. It’s early days, but I’m already feeling a huge weight has lifted.

I want to find a way to print birdsong onto fabric using cyanotype chemistry (cyanotype printing is a camera-less process that prints images directly onto paper using sunlight and light-sensitive chemistry). To help with IDing birdsong, I used the app Merlin which records, identifies, saves and exports birdsongs as audio files. I use a free secondary software designed for wildlife acoustic analysis (Kaleidoscope) to pull up an uninterrupted view of the recording onto my screen so I can play with it. I like how a soundwave gives a song anatomy and agility, but I’ve yet to figure out how I could encapsulate these fleeting avian chimes into something tangible. The recently-procured sheets of muslin and bottles of cyanotype chemistry are in for a messy, hopeful treat.

Pacific wren

MacGillivray’s warbler

Yellow-rumped warbler, purple finch, and pacific-slope flycatcher

Chipping sparrow and brown creeper