We live in a relatively quiet neighborhood. I’m sure it’s not the silence of the countryside, but for a home on a city street, there are still some distinct sounds of nature.

Several mornings this summer I’ve wakened to the calls of the mourning dove. The bedroom window is only open a short distance, so the bird must be close by and calling to another. I know it’s not alone. The doves on the ground near our bird feeder are always arriving, feeding and departing in pairs. The call of the dove is a special sound for waking, much better than an alarm clock.

Spiritually there is a tradition that a visit from the dove brings hope, love, peace. They may appear in a time of personal crisis. I’m intrigued by their name, “mourn-ing.” Shouldn’t it be “morn-ing,” since they waken me? What is it they are grieving? Loss of the natural world?

Sitting on the porch during the approach of rainy weather the last couple of days, I’ve been more aware of storms and their sounds. Watching the lower black clouds, moving quickly across the sky; seeing the lightning higher above striking horizontally; and hearing the thunder in the distance as the rain moved closer and closer; all of it made me more sensitive to the acoustic ecology of the experience.

An interview with Gordon Hempton introduced me to that phrase, “acoustic ecology.” Gordon is known as “The Sound Tracker.” He tracks and records the sounds of the natural world. For him, “Earth Is a Solar Powered Jukebox.” His interview in The Sun introduced me for the first time to the discipline of Soundscape Studies and The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.

One of his projects was One Square Inch of Silence. Airplanes are audible for 20 miles in any direction. Hempton wanted to find one square inch in a national park where you could sit in silence without the sound of a plane. That was challenging. For instance, there are more than 90,000 air tours over the Grand Canyon yearly. Hampton ended up choosing Olympic National Park as the most likely site. He marked the silent spot with a red stone, later removed by park officials.

The noise of the human world intrudes everywhere. It’s becoming more difficult to hear the beat of the hummingbird wings in the backyard, or the nagging of the wren. If it’s not motorcycles or loud pick up mufflers on the street, it’s the airplanes overhead. In our neighborhood, you can hear the student pilots leave the airport as they take off; hear them make a large circle; then practice a landing and become airborne again. (And I’m hard of hearing.)

There are sounds from the wild I’ll never forget. There was the early morning smack of the beaver tail on the Black Hills pond and the late night calls of the loons on the lake in Maine. There was the sound of the frenzied ocean waves off the coast of India and the hum of the bees at the Mexican hives. There was the owl in the top of the Brookings courthouse and the derecho outside our basement door.

Leading night hikes at camp in New Hampshire, there was the sound of the toad jumping off the path, sounding at least like a rabbit or a raccoon in the darkness. Leaving New York City and driving straight to Aberdeen, South Dakota, there was the adjustment to noise levels and the nervous twitches because of the silence.

And there were more positive and memorable human sounds: the otherworldly chanting in the India hilltop temple; the organist practicing at midnight in the nave of the Riverside Church; the drum group at the Rosebud Wacipi; the acapella choir using silences to enhance the sounds; the sound of a smile.

Gordon Hampton believes we all need an acoustically special place to love. “Natural silence allows us to fall in love with a place and appreciate how unique it is.” He also believes that special place helps us be more loving with each other and more responsible to the gift of the earth. I expect he would agree with Chaim Potok: “I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” And with Robert Lynd: “In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.”