Nature Track

No music, no human voices, just the sound of night falling over bushland near Narrabri, recorded by the ABC's Ann Jones. It sounds like camping. Narrabri is in North West NSW, in an incredibly fertile farming area. And yep, you guessed it, where it's fertile, it means you won't get much bushland left intact. This bushland is a patch on the Llara Farm which is used by the University of Sydney for research. I was lucky enough to travel there to film a program about technology and nature for 'Catalyst' on ABC TV. This recording differs a little from some of the others I've made for Nature Track. For example, there is no way that I can completely remove the distant sound of highway movement, of the endless trucks ferrying agricultural products towards the city. But this is an incredibly endearing mix of the insect chorus for me. It sounds like camping. A chorus of ravens in the distance, along with cockies going to sleep, and some sounds I cannot identify kick off this most relaxing soundscape yet. Listening…

No music. No voices. Just the sound of a quiet ocean inlet in the early evening, recorded by the ABC's Dr Ann Jones. This shoreline is home to many wallabies; will they make any sound? This was recorded over the summer of 2021/22 as I was spending time on Phillip Island / Millowl in Victoria, filming for 'Meet the Penguins' on ABC TV. I put the recorder out at Rhyll Inlet as the sun is setting. It's been a hot day and the cicadas are calling. Rhyll Inlet is a mixture of saltmarsh, mudflats, mangroves and some scrubby bits too. Slightly uphill, away from the water, there are grassy areas where wallabies abound. This is where the recording is taken. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 00:00:39 Lower toned repeating call given in a short burst is the white-eared honeyeater. This bird is striking. It's somewhere between green and yellow, with a black face and a blob of white right behind its eye. 00:02:20 This is still that same honeyeater. 00:02:35 Eastern rosellas – gorgeous birds and I can just imagine their…

No music. No human voices. Just the sound of a frog chorus and a pre-dawn rain shower in arid Western Australia, recorded on location by the ABC's Dr Ann Jones. Get in a car in Perth and drive 4 hours northeast to sit beside a pool of water as the frogs call and rain rolls in. It's an hour before dawn. This soundscape was recorded on Badimaya country on Charles Darwin Reserve which is owned by Bush Heritage Australia. I was there to film an amazing tree called the sandalwood for 'Australia's Favourite Tree' on ABC TV. The reserve is on the edge of the Southwest Botanical Province, which has more plant biodiversity that a tropical forest, and also the arid Eremean areas. And because it's on the borderlands, there are so many plants, animals, birds, and in this recording in particular amphibians to love. 00:00:00 The first thing that you hear is the Western Toadlets — Pseudophryne occidentalis. At least, this is the best guess without a DNA sample. You see, this area is in the overlap between two different…

No music, no voices. Just the sound of the mountain ash forest, recorded by the ABC's Dr Ann Jones. The mountain ash is the tallest flowering plant in the world, a eucalypt that can reach 90m in height. And beneath its arbour is an incredible array of wildlife, including an incredible chorus of birds. I recorded this while filming 'Australia's Favourite Tree' for ABC TV near Marysville in Victoria. It was a cold, misty morning on Taungurong Country and among the first sounds that can be heard in this recording is a male lyrebird practising some of his repertoire – both mimicry and his own sounds. 00:01:51 The lyrebird is imitating a black cockie here. 00:03:42 this lazer sort of sound is the lyrebird's own sounds. 00:06:25 The lyrebird makes both the male and female components of the whip bird call! 00:06:55 Heeeeere comes a parrot, screaming as it goes. 00:07:20 Pied Currawongs call to each other in the distance. 00:23:00 A fly fly-by! 00:35:10 Actual yellow tailed black-cockatoos incoming! 00:36:40 This…

No music, no talking, just the sound of a rain storm in the desert. Wiluna is a town on the Traditional lands of the Martu people in Western Australia. It’s on gorgeous arid country, about 960km east of Perth. After days of dry heat in excess of 40, it was late afternoon when a huge storm rolled in. Nowhere has storms like the desert, where the hot air rises off the ground to meet the clouds with huge rumbles and rolls that expand across the whole horizon. The rain continued on and off all night and into the next day when I got up in the morning to smell the wet sands and concrete of the town. Each burst of rain was greeted by bird song throughout the sunrise, and as the human occupants of the town slowly woke up. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 04:28 Here comes the rain on the tin roof. The galahs scatter, calling. 5:10 A bonded pair of mudlarks (tiwily-tiwilypa), sometimes called peewees or magpie larks. sing a duet together. 10:50 The pied butcherbirds (kararaputa) sing through the rainfall — a…

No music, no voices, just imagine you’re camping beside a creek in early spring. Listening Notes from Ann: It was the first hot day of Spring on Wadawurrung Country west of Melbourne. Out of bed before the sun, I walked through the bush listening to the last of the nocturnal sounds, and found a place on a ridgeline overlooking a creek. There are hundreds of large trees with lots of hollows all scattered across the steep slope down to the creek and I set the recorders out just as the dawn chorus begins in earnest. There is the smallest of overlap between the boobooks calling as they settled to sleep, and the magpies and kookaburras leading the dawn chorus with their greetings to the sun (and territorial threatening screams of course). There are so, so many species in this recording – too many to list entirely! 00:00:16 The boobook calls. Listen for a second boobook, who calls at 00:00:48, with a slightly different pitch. In the middle of the night, you can hear the boobooks call right along the creek.…

No music, no voices, just the sound of night time at a swamp on Wadawarrung Country in Victoria. Listening Notes from Ann Jones: There are at least three species of frogs calling all the way through this recording – maybe more. And they provide a wonderful blanket of noise for you to snuggle under. Here’s what I can hear: 00:00:07 – The ‘tonk’, ‘bonk’ and ‘donk’ of the pobblebonk (Limnodynastes dumerilii). These frogs are sometimes also called banjo frogs because of their plucking call. They are a relatively big frog, maybe 8 or 9 cm long when fully grown, with a very pleased look on their face. 00:00:15 This is the spotted marsh frog (Limnodynastes tasmaniensis) and it’s an interesting one. It sounds a bit like a striped marsh frog. But Jordann and Gracie from the Australian Museum FrogID team assure me it’s the southern call race of the spotted! In the north part of its range, the call of the spotted marsh frog is entirely different than in western Victoria. 00:00:44 The consisted creaking of thousands of…

No music, no voices, just the sound of the forest waking up. I made this recording on a wintery morning, outside a hut high up in the mountains of Gippsland on Gunaikurnai land. I arrived in the dark and didn’t realise how high up the hill I was. As the sun rose it took time for it to reach the bottom of the gullies, and so the dawn chorus extended longer and was more distant and echoey. It’s harder than normal to decipher what’s what in this recording because all around the hut there were lyrebirds singing, and they’re masters of imitation. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 00:00:00 As the sun rises and warms the roof, icy water drips to the ground creating clicks and drips throughout. Immediately, several lyrebird males can be heard rehearsing their songs. This isn’t normally the time of day that they’d be wooing a female directly, it’s more for practice and territorial defence, and also perhaps luring a female towards their dancing mound. They call like this throughout the coldest part of winter. 00:02:06…

No music, no voices, just the sound of the forest waking up. This recording was made while traveling through Whadjuk Nyoongar land, WA. The birds differ between east and west Australia. That huge swathe of arid country in between has meant that birds have evolved into different sub-species, species and variants. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 00:00:00 Normally I would cut out my footsteps walking away from the microphone, but this audio is too beautiful. You can hear carolling magpies, as well as black cockatoos. These are either Baudin’s or Carnaby’s or both. They sometimes do hang out together. Both are endangered species. 00:04:05 An Australian ringneck parrot. This is about the size of a rosella and with a wonderful green body, a black head and a yellow neck around the nape of its head. 00:04:20 A pee-wee or mudlark calling here. They vary slightly across the continent. 00:14:50 Ringnecks are sometimes called twenty-eights in WA because that is sort of what their call sounds like – ‘twenty-eight’.…

No music, no voices, just the sound of a spring shower hitting a corrugated iron roof. This recording was made on Wadawurrung Country, in west Victoria, Australia. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 00:02:00 Wind in the trees, and grey currawongs calling to each other in chiming duets. 00:06:00 Galahs fly past, their nesting hollow is close by. 00:07:41 I think this could be brown thornbills, tiny little birds. But would you believe, they’re actually sort of chunky for thornbills, at about seven grams. Thornbills are super tricky to identify because they’re all tiny and brown. And on top of that, sometimes they like to hang out altogether in a big mixed flock feeding. 00:18:40 As a rain shower ends the birds still come out singing. 00:27:00 An eastern common froglet calling at the dam in the distance. 01:04:24 A superb fairy-wren comes and goes calling all the while.

No music, no voices, just the sound of the forest coming to life early one morning near Canberra -- where the gum trees grow small and with twisting white trunks. In the twilight of the morning I creep out from under the covers to set up the microphones right next to a dam. We are on the land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, and not far away there are paddocks, livestock, a road and a farmhouse. But right here all there is, is nature waking up for the day. Listen for the drops of dew falling from the gumtrees and onto the leaf-litter below. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 02:34, 04:50 and all through the recording, you can hear rosellas softly chattering to each other, their wing beats as they fly between trees, and the tiny clicks of them cracking open gumnuts to eat the softer seeds inside. They are probably crimson rosellas. 06:17 Australian magpies are the only birds in the world that carol like this. 08:15 Hear those wing beats? It's literally the sound of the air flowing over the feathers of bird…

No music, no voices, just the sound of the Roebuck Bay mudflats near Broome, WA. Hear the breeze across the water, crabs and mudskippers flipping and flopping, and a tide that slowly comes in. Roebuck Bay is on the traditional lands of the Yawuru people is one of the most magical places in Australia. It is a 34,119-hectare mudflat, washed every day by a tide that reaches kilometres from the shoreline. In the sapphire waters there are all sorts of sea turtles, saw fish and dugongs, and the red sands roll down to meet the water in a way that is absolutely unique to this area. It is a wetland of international significance, used every year by at least 300,000 shorebirds as a launching pad for their migration to the Northern Hemisphere. This recording is on the edge of the clicks and snips of tiny mudskippers as they move around the mudflats at low tides is the constant white noise of nature. On the edge of the mudflats of Broome you hear a mix of shorebirds and passerines as well as the cicadas which buzz in…

No music, no voices, just the sound of a valley halfway up a Tasmanian mountain. This soundscape is full of birds and breeze echoing backwards and forwards across a reservoir. Kunyani is swirled with mist and the city of Hobart spreads below, in miniature, on a still, early morning. We’re halfway up the mountain, at the Hobart Waterworks Reserve where two huge reservoirs store water for use by the populace below. The deep valley where the reservoirs are situated means there is an echoey, dream-like quality to all the sound. You can hear a unique mix of forest and water birds at this place every single morning. There were tawny frogmouths coming as I trudged up the hill, and as I was sitting listening to the day unfold a scarlet robin danced on the edge of the bush — feeding, patrolling and, just maybe, calling for the microphone. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 06:06 A fan-tailed cuckoo calls, making a trilling, descending whistle, quavering slightly as it goes. This cuckoo is a parasitic breeder, sneakily…

No music, no voices, just the sound of a gentle stream and frogs calling on a still, cool night in regional Victoria. Moonlight floods the landscape of Wadawurrung country. Big, old candlebarks stand still and silent and a creek flows through a shallow valley. Grasses grow up to the waist, except where kangaroos have been nibbling them! And within the sedges by the creek lurk frogs who revel in the still night, the cold air and the perfect opportunity to sing for a mate. It's hard to hear many of the other sounds above the water flowing and the frogs, but there are actually many creatures in this recording if you've got very good ears and time to listen hard. Listening notes from Ann Jones: 01:50 Common eastern froglet with a "creaky-creaky-creaky" call. Don't let the name fool you — these are tiny frogs, with a maximum size of 3cm. The best way to see them is to wait until night and use a torch to try and see tiny little eyes on the edge of the water. They will appear in almost any habitat really, they're…

No music. No voices. Just the sound of a creek bed in outback Australia. In the Murchison district in Western Australia you're surrounded by low lying ranges where rocks have been found that are 4.4 billion years old — they're almost as ancient as the planet itself. Among the crests and dips of Wajarri country is a creek bed on Boolardy Station. Not flowing, but water is still there. And the places where there is water in this arid environment – well, it's a mecca for birdlife. Listen for: chiming wedgebills, lots of flies and other insects, rainbow bee-eaters, crested bellbirds, babblers and diamond doves among many many more. Mix Engineer: Isabella Tropiano. This program is produced on the land of the Wathawurung people.

No music, no human voices. Just the sound of an epic summer storm rolling on through the evening. I recorded this at my home. It had been a hot day, and in the late afternoon there was a crack of thunder. I walked out, set the recorder near the woodpile and recorded into the night. In this recording you can hear rain falling, hitting the earth and also hitting the microphones. And you can hear lots and lots of thunder. At first, the afternoon and evening chorus continues, but as the storm intensifies, just the cockies scream. Then, as darkness falls, insects take up the lulls between thunder and rain. Mix Engineer: Isabella Tropiano. This program is produced on the land of the Wathawurung people.

SOUNDS LIKE: The pressure release of rain drops hitting parched red sand after a sweltering day and possibly the best owl recording that Ann has ever taken. CONTAINS: Patches of rain, and distant frogs happy with the rain, kingfishers with insomnia. And a spectacular territorial display from barking owls. RECOMMENDED FOR: Lovers of weather, of romance and whimsy, and also of birds-which-sound-like-they're-anything-but-birds enthusiasts. ANN'S NERDY SOUND NOTES: This is an incredibly dramatic place — and a special place in Yinjibarndi lore. It definitely has that gravitas. The water is surrounded in part by dark red, iron-filled cliff faces, cool grey-blue spinifex clumps and immense river red gums right at the water's edge. Even in the middle of the night, and even when it is raining enough to form puddles on the sand, the waterholes of arid Australia are centres of activity. So, although the landscape is all red sand and rocks, spinifex and heat haze, beside this spring-fed waterhole at Millstream…

SOUNDS LIKE: Laying in a hammock, your eyes closed, no-one for 500km, surrounded by red sand, listening to the wind in trees that've been around since the dinosaurs. Perfect conditions for a nap. Sometimes, you just need to a bit of silence. Of course, nature is rarely silent. She's even better than that. She's better than ANY noise machine a human has ever invented. Let the sound of wind through needle-leaves on Akerre Country lull your worries away. CONTAINS: Wind. Quiet. Zebra finches. Budgies. Mysterious rustling of small critters. RECOMMENDED FOR: Fans of gentle soundscapes and wind in sheoaks, those who don't want machine white noise but need to put a baby to sleep. ANN'S NERDY SOUND NOTES: I have a weatherproof recorder that I can stick out in almost any conditions and in this case I attached it to what has been called 'Australia's loneliest tree' in the Simpson Desert. To get there from Alice Springs, you travel through dune country, past ridges and through dry creek beds. And then all of a sudden a…

SOUNDS LIKE: The 'shhhh' sound that tropical dreams are made of as gentle waves roll through mangrove trees on an island paradise. It's hushed and peaceful. CONTAINS: Soft waves, and salt water moving quite continuously. Quiet insects throughout. The sounds occupy different frequencies and rhythms so they can all be heard clearly even when they're all calling. Listen for high pitched maraca-like single shakes, rickety-whirring phrases, tiny yaps marking a beat, or what sounds like a tiny mobile phone calling somewhere around 9khz. RECOMMENDED FOR: Fans of quiet white noise, waves and water sounds. Or those who like blocking out noisy colleagues by putting on outrageously large headphones and listening to the ocean instead. ANN'S NERDY SOUND NOTES: This place is White Lotus meets scientific research. At the Orpheus Island Research Station, the island is skirted by bright white sand, its steep hills covered in green vegetation, but rather than pleasure craft, it's practical research vessels anchored in the…

CONTAINS: A consistent insect chorus with a rufous owl calling intermittently throughout. RECOMMENDED FOR: Those who like white noise, brown noise, pink noise. For people who want a consistent soundscape to help mask the sounds of the city, who want something almost mechanical or synthesised to help drown their thoughts. ANN'S NERDY SOUND NOTES: Subtle pulsations, and vibrations, with ticking, buzzing and swooshing that forms soft waves of white noise. It is the insect chorus in rainforest in Cape York, QLD. This recording was taken in the area under the care of Mapoon Aboriginal Council, next to a tidal river with mangroves in a patch of forest that is dense with life. There are crickets and katydids calling and probably a large range of other things that I'll never be able to identify. 00:01:20 An orange-footed scrubfowl is calling in the distance. 00:08:40 The clicks and snaps of movement. Also, of things falling from trees — perhaps discarded seeds by animals, leaves, or fruit. 00:15:00 A brush cuckoo…

SOUNDS LIKE: You're waking up while on holiday in a tropical rainforest, surrounded by exotic birds. Layers of sound are like vine tendrils curling through the jungle canopy: the birds are near, far, above and right next to you. Let them drown out whatever is giving you the sh*ts. In reality, this place in Cape York isn't really visited by tourists. It's one of those spots that the locals from Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council in Far North Queensland know about. CONTAINS: Mostly birbs. And a curious wallaroo later on.You'll hear green orioles, which sound like someone dropping PVC pipes, orange-footed scrubfowl which call out like an old lady (a posh one) getting a fright and even one of Australia's rarest birds, the palm cockatoo. Minimal flies and mozzies. RECOMMENDED FOR: Those who wish they could travel to every corner of the globe, for when you need something a bit louder to drown out some neighbours, or your thoughts. For bird people (and those who wish they were bird people). ANN'S NERDY SOUND NOTES:…

SOUNDS LIKE: You have eschewed modern life and joined your new BFF — a wombat — to live a life of naps, snacks and cute attacks. CONTAINS: A clear, cold night and the wombats are stirring, stomping, scratching and most of all, crunching their way through about 2kgs of grass. Nearby, the wombat's neighbours undertake nocturnal shenanigans and no-one seems to get any sleep. Except you. There are birds which should be awake, birds which should be asleep, possums and the star of the show — the bare-nosed wombats. RECOMMENDED FOR: Explorers and the curious, those who want to feel awe and joy at discovering secrets that nature holds close to her chest. ANN'S NERDY SOUND NOTES: I didn't set out to record wombats. But when I went out one evening on Ngunnawal Country in the ACT, I stumbled upon an area that was almost as if it'd been exploded from below - there were holes and dirt EVERYWHERE. And I know a wombat poo when I see one -> 🟫 <- So, I found an active burrow entrance, with some grass nearby (that I thought…