Naturalist Gives Squirrels a Voice: Discover What They Really ‘Say’

Lyon (Rhône), reportage

In his ears, trees groan with human-like voices, the queen bee weeps, and the anthill crackles like a campfire. At 28, Charles Rose is an audio naturalist. For his many followers on social media, he records the sounds of nature to “raise awareness about respecting living beings”.

Dressed in a lumberjack shirt and hiking boots, the young man, who recently moved to Lyon, sets out to explore the Tête d’Or Park, a green oasis spanning about 100 hectares in the city center.

“If it were up to me, I’d live in a cabin deep in the woods,” jokes Rose. For today’s expedition, he’s equipped with his “sound hunter” backpack filled with a headset, a recorder, and about fifteen microphones. Each serves a specific purpose: the hydrophone for water bodies, the geophone for lower frequencies, etc.

After a brief shower, the gray autumn sky clears up. “It’s a pity, I could have recorded the sound of the raindrops hitting the ground and leaves,” says Charles Rose. With no rain, he sets off in search of a sound that “amazes him every time”: the sound of moss.

“Sound is visible because it’s a vibration produced when elements rub against each other, when living beings move,” explains the audio naturalist. He waits: the wind rustling the leaves of a tree, the bustling of dung beetles on the moist ground, a squirrel gathering provisions for winter.

One hour into his exploration, with senses heightened, he finds it along a path edge. The moss. Rose repeats the motions he knows by heart. He places his stethoscope-looking microphone on the green fuzz as if to take its pulse. He is focused, seemingly listening to a language he understands. To the untrained ear, it sounds like a hungry stomach. “It’s the moss stems moving and creating this gurgling noise,” he explains.

To elucidate the phenomena he records, Rose, who has no formal training in biology, often collaborates with experts. “One day, I was recording wind in a cornfield, but there was a strange sound I didn’t recognize. After researching scientific studies, I realized it was a bug vibrating the stalks to attract its mate. It’s incredible,” he shares.

Seeing him quickly identify the call of a magpie, one might think the audio naturalist was born in the woods. However, the trained engineer grew up in the city. “I started connecting with nature quite late, in my twenties. Since then, I’ve become a big kid; everything amazes me,” he says.

A lover of electronic music, he then incorporates sounds of the living into his art: an animal’s cry becomes a synthesizer, a falling water droplet a percussion. The student becomes passionate about audio naturalism and takes to social media.

“I don’t create: the living beings speak. I merely relay with my microphone,” says the young man, modestly refusing the label of content creator. Spending half his time in the field and the other half editing sounds, Charles Rose builds a “large sound library” that reflects the richness of our ecosystems. Museums, filmmakers, and even researchers draw from it for their projects.

“There’s definitely a collector’s aspect to what I do. But I don’t like to keep my discoveries to myself; I love to share,” says Rose, whose work has an encyclopedic dimension.

Seriously, he describes his expedition a few months ago to the Tuvalu islands in the South Pacific, to record the sounds of the archipelago, while 95% of its territory could be submerged by the end of the century: “These sounds now exist in a sound bank that will preserve the island’s memory,” explains Charles Rose.

Today, over 40,000 species are threatened worldwide by climate change, according to the latest report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. For the audio naturalist, it’s imperative to learn to respect nature: “I believe that sound has a real power to raise awareness. By capturing the sound of an earthworm passing under our feet or the nibbling of a slug, I want to make the living being even more alive in the eyes of humans. And I think that maybe people will be more careful where they step.”

It finally starts to rain. Among the Sunday walkers, Charles Rose is perhaps the only one who is pleased. “Let’s head to the pond, it’s going to be great.” He pulls out a new microphone, immerses it, and puts on his headset. Immediately, his expression changes. His look is puzzled, his finger on his lip signals his bafflement: “I’ve never heard this before. I’m so happy!”

To the uninitiated, the sound is nothing extraordinary, a very high-pitched noise, almost unpleasant to the ear. “It’s like the noise of grasshoppers or crickets, but underwater. Maybe little crayfish,” he muses aloud.

For long minutes, he listens, under the curious gaze of passers-by. “Mommy, what is the man doing?” Some approach, asking about the purpose of the long cable he wraps around his hand.

“On a hike in Germany, I spent seven hours recording an anthill. Naturally, hikers wonder who this weird guy lying down with a headset is,” he says, amused and accustomed to arousing curiosity.

A squirrel comes down from a tree and rubs against his hand, drawing a broad smile on the face of the sound hunter. No time to pull out his microphones, the animal is quick. “Sometimes, sound events happen suddenly, and I’m not ready, but it’s still a beautiful moment.”

The most beautiful of all, perhaps, occurred a few months ago, during an exploration in a Quebec forest. There, Charles Rose found himself face to face with a moose. The creature was imposing. “It was very close, it could have charged. We looked at each other for two good minutes. Then it left. Nature was less fearful in Quebec,” he shares.

A nature lover and vegetarian, Charles Rose places respect for the living at the heart of his practice. To avoid “disturbing” the “non-humans” he records, he crafted a boom pole so as not to have to touch them.

Near the pond of North American turtles in the park, he carefully approaches his microphone to a sleeping reptile. He gives up after a few minutes “to let it nap in peace”

Because Charles Rose is human. Noisy. During his expeditions, he’s well aware: nature is contaminated by the noise we make. “I’ve made several videos on noise pollution. For example, I dipped my microphone in the Saint Lawrence River, in Quebec,” he recounts. “You could hear the noise of ships passing several kilometers away, affecting marine mammals.”

The areas where only natural sounds can be heard have decreased by 50% to 90% compared to the pre-industrial era.

Night is about to fall on the Lyon park. Flocks of noisy birds fly overhead. “Wow, you can really hear them well at this time of day,” marvels the audio naturalist. Indeed, for the attentive ear.

“Eyes have eyelids, ears do not,” he poeticizes. “This phrase taught me to take the time to listen. A creak, a small animal lurking around… I believe the more we listen, the more we respect.”