“As I leave the car at the end of the road and start walking uphill, I try to remember how many times I’ve been here. More than 30 years ago I came here with my grandfather to buy lumber for a small construction project we had going on. My knowledge of acoustic ecology was rather limited then, but that didn’t stop me from appreciating the soundscape and asking questions about the animals and birds I could hear. Afterwards there was a long period when life got in the way and I was too busy to come back here. Around 2013 I returned after getting burned out from work, and I felt like I was meeting an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time.
Vanatori Neamt natural park is not completely off limits for people. Parts of the park overlap with villages and countryside. A network of roads allows easy access to most of this landscape, and where the roads end there are footpaths and hiking trails. Monasteries dot the forest, and the din of human activity is present in most areas. This doesn’t sound very promising for recording pure nature sounds, but I don’t mind having occasional human elements in my recordings (as long as they’re not combustion engines or other grating man-made sounds).
It took me a few years of coming back and exploring these lands to find enough pockets of quiet. The topography certainly helps. Steep hillsides will shield little valleys from distant anthropophony. Since human sounds change throughout the day and year, the only way to find quiet is to keep going in the field and recording for long periods of time. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.
No matter where I go on our little planet, I am being drawn back to these rough landscapes that I grew up in. I remember being in the vast deserts of Namibia, or the humid cloud forests of Papua New Guinea, and I would find little things that reminded me of the landscapes of my childhood. Coming back here feels like a pilgrimage I have to do at least once a year to recharge.
Some of these hillsides can be steep and rough, but an interesting encounter can happen at every step. I’ve seen the bison here a handful times. Birds and small mammals are plentiful and not very difficult to see. I’ve seen bear and lynx tracks several times. The more effort I put into exploring the park, the better recordings I manage to capture.
Beyond the immediate results I get with my equipment, the feelings of immersion and intimate knowledge of the landscape are slightly more difficult to put into words, but no less rewarding. And then there’s the element of being able to share this with the world. Seeing images of this place can be exciting, but only by listening to long-form soundscapes one will be able to properly tune in to the landscape.”
George Vlad – Field notes from Vanatori Neamt
