Hello. Coming, coming. There’s a trogon there. Wildlife. You want to see wild animals. You want to track them. You want to unpack how they live their lives. But visuals give you only part of their story. To complete the picture, what if you also started listening to animals? After all, animals communicate. And a lot of that communication is through sounds. Initially, when I used to look at the sea, I used to think that “Oh, it’s very calm, you know.”
But then when you put down a recorder, there’s this whole world underneath. You really can't miss the call. It's so loud. It is so in-your-face that you're wondering what's going on. Welcome to Wild Frequencies, a three-part mini series on Mongabay-India's podcast channel, Everything Environment. I’m Kartik Chandramouli and I'm Shreya Dasgupta.
And together we travelled to different parts of India and we spoke with multiple researchers who are using this emerging science called bioacoustics to study wildlife. Researchers who listen to what animals are saying. Animals that are tiny. Does it matter that one male is going like, “krrk krrk krrk.” Other one is going like, “krrk... krrk...” Animals that are massive. As soon as they hear the word ‘elephant,’ they will hear this *imitates a trumpet* Animals that are audible to us.
People call it the ‘ghost of the grasslands.’ And animals that we humans can't hear. They are extremely active... Oh, that’s a different species. In this series, you’ll hear wildlife researchers from India share their stories of animal sounds. And they'll decode those wild frequencies for us. One song, one howl and one chirp at a time. You can find Wild Frequencies on Mongabay-India's Everything Environment podcast feed. The first episode will be out next week.
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