The Crest

Over the Crest they flew. The birds descended on the enclave while the FORC scientists stood outside in astonishment. Birds of various sizes and colors perched in the trees, on bushes, on the sides of buildings, along wires, poles, and fences. The wonderment of the researchers became the confirmation of a hypothesis — the idea that pockets of wilderness still existed out in the great beyond, and for that…they were grateful.

Danielle rushed into the office. “We’ve got a fucking avian love fest going on across the enclave and I need to know what the hell is going on. Karl? Fernando?”

“It worked,” Karl said.

“What worked?”

“The infrasonic broadcast, remember? We digitally recorded and amplified the pleasant infrasonic signal of plants and broadcast it out.”

“What the…" She became confused. "You’re kidding me. That experimental broadcast?”

“Yep, I’m pretty sure that was it. We used the electret array microphones to pick up the infra-sound of the seedlings. We had a low impedance output and then we amplified that with an amp and used a short pass to filter out the higher frequencies.”

“Huh? God damnit Karl, simplify.”

“Okay, we can’t hear infrasound below a frequency of 20 Hertz but animals can, and we recorded the plants.”

“Then what?”

“Well, we know that infrasound can cover long distances and move around obstacles with little degeneracy. These sound waves are very common in earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, and others. They even use infrasound in seismocardiography to study the heart. They studied elephant rumbles a lot, with many infrasound frequencies. Same with whales, rhinoceros, giraffes, and alligators.”

“What about ultrasonic, don’t you pick that up as well, making your data garbled?”

“We can filter out the noise of ultrasonic.”

“What about the amplifier?”

"Our infrasound amplifier strengthened the infrasonic frequencies from 0.25 to 25 Hertz.”

“Why do you think it was your infrasound amplifier that called in the birds? It could have been something else that caused them to flock here. They’re out of food or habitat.”

“True, it could have been something else, but what? Birds usually flock like this to find food, so yes, it’s desperate out there but,” he paused. “All these different species arriving at the same time. Come on, Danielle, admit it, they were following something.”

“How far did your broadcast go?”

“Don’t know but infra-sounds at 20 Hertz can travel pretty far and are less absorbed by their surroundings than higher frequency sounds, so they travel farther. Think of earthquakes, the P waves they produce are longitudinal and can travel long distances. Then there was the meteorite that hit Chelyabinsk in Russia, in 2013, the waves circled the earth twice.”

“Okay, you might be on to something. I mean…” She stumbled for the right words, “Geez, this might be the first evidence that animals can hear plants. It’s stunning if that’s the case. But what about these murmurations?”

“A murmuration is a visual invitation to attract other starlings to join a night roost. They roost in these large numbers for safety and to conserve body heat. Obviously, these birds think the enclave is a safe place to roost for the night, because they picked up the infrasonic broadcast.”

“So, you’re saying that the pleasant sounds of plants attracted the birds from a distance.”

“We think so, and from long distances away, and yes, the implications for adaptive evolution are huge.”

“Break it down for me.”

“One possibility is that plants propagate their own species by attracting animals with sounds. They also might protect themselves by signaling animals.”

“How so?”

“A tree might call out other birds to come and eat its fruit which will then disperse the seeds. A tree might say to a flock of robins, hey, I’ve got a lot of gypsy moth caterpillars over here eating my leaves, come and eat them. This co-evolution communication between plants and animals has been around for millions of years but we didn’t know about it. Who is to say that plants don’t communicate with animals and animals don’t respond? Do you understand what that means?”

“Spell it out for me, Karl.”

“It means that we might find that, for example, pollination results from sound communication not just colors, scents, nectar, and the other things we associate with pollination. What it potentially means is that a bird nesting in a tree is actually listening to determine if the tree is happy or sick. If the tree is happy, it might be a good place to raise its young.”

The trained scientific mind of Danielle couldn’t handle words like ‘happy.’ Karl had a way of personifying plants that could be both frustrating and endearing. “You’re outrageous, Karl, and un-fucking believable, but I have no reason not to believe you.”

Danielle paced up and down the laboratory, her rational brain trying to organize the information she just caught. She looked at her senior researcher. “Karl, you’re certainly thinking out of the box on this one….” And then she paused.

He looked at her curiously.

“Keep up the good work, but what are we going to do about the birds out there? And stop the damn infrasonic broadcasts.” She turned briskly out of the building, shaking her head in disbelief.

Karl looked at Fernando and smiled. “We’re making progress,” he said.