“The intangible version of an undeveloped area where you don't have buildings, you don't have roads. You look at that and you say this is complete. This is intact. And the same way for a soundscape. You don't hear a bus going by or a helicopter or an aircraft or a jet overhead. That's what, an intact soundscape would be.”

As Grand Canyon’s Wilderness Coordinator, Mike Kearsley spent years understanding what makes a healthy soundscape. This and more in this episode of Behind the Scenery!

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Jesse: Hey, this is Jesse. On this episode of the podcast, we're featuring an interview with retired Grand Canyon Wilderness Coordinator, Mike Kearsley. The interview was recorded by Desert View rangers Dawn Thompson and Melissa Panter. You’ll also hear from Science and Resource Management Deputy Chief Sarah Haas at the very end of the episode. Enjoy.

Mike: My name is Mike Kearsley. Now I am retired from the Park Service. I do still work a little bit. I work for, the road scholar program at NAU doing hikes with people, showing them the Grand Canyon, Organ Pipe, Saguaro other places like that. And before that, I worked in the Resource Management Division at Grand Canyon. I started working there in 2007. Was brought on to do the vegetation map. I mapped, coordinated the vegetation mapping of the park and parts of Lake Mead that were part of Grand Canyon Parishant National Monument. And after that ended in 2012, I worked on the backcountry management plan. We, I did mostly impacts analysis and affected environment writing, that kind of thing. And then in 2016 became the wilderness coordinator and um and actually became a permanent employee in 2019. Yeah. Yeah. And, as Wilderness Coordinator, one of the duties was working on soundscapes questions along with minimum requirements analyses, impacts analysis, backcountry campsite monitoring, all kinds of stuff.

Dawn: Yeah. So for most people listening, they might not know what a soundscape is. So, would you want to, like, explain what that, is and what that means?

Mike: Um it, it's the acoustic environment that you are in. It is the auditory or acoustic qualities of an area, and it's specific to the area, specific to the time of year.

Dawn: In my, in my program, I talk about soundscapes. I'm like, it's inescapable. Like you're always in a soundscape, always,

Mike: You’re always in a soundscape!

Dawn: And you're always contributing to it.

Mike: It's one of the intangible parts of the environment that you're in. It's like the, like a smell, like aroma.

Dawn: So when you were studying soundscapes at the Grand Canyon, what exactly where you studying or looking for?

Mike: We were mostly doing, compliance monitoring for overflights. Overflights are limited to certain parts of the park, and the reason for doing that is that they want to limit the amount, the total area of the park that is exposed to aircraft noise more than a certain percentage of the day. And so we had our listening stations set up underneath these air tour corridors. So that was the primary reason for monitoring soundscapes.

Dawn: Yeah. When you're talking about like, a listening station, like, what do you, like describe that to me.

Mike: OK. It's, it's a set up that has two components. One of them is just an audio recorder, a digital audio recorder that records the sounds, and it's paired with a sound pressure level meter that's a little more technical. It does more or less the same thing, but it breaks the, sounds into intervals of the sound spectrum that are one third octave tall or one third octave broad. And for each of those intervals of the spectrum, it says it, it records how, how much sound pressure there is, the, the loudness of that sound pressure.

Dawn: Right.

Mike: So there's those two things, microphones, a solar panel, a big battery pack. And usually we would put a wildlife camera out just to, in case there was something that was happening that we picked up on the acoustic recording and didn't understand what was making it we could we could look at that. We recorded some really interesting wildlife stuff, trespass livestock coming through.

Dawn: Yeah! Mike: Horses, destroying the the solar panels turning over all of our buckets. It was uh, it's fun. Yeah.

Dawn: Yeah. I think on the the sound drive, there's, audio of elk licking the foam off of, like, an SM4, which is pretty funny.

Mike: Yep. What is that sound? Well, now we needed a way to understand what that sound was.

Dawn: Wait, so were you like manning these, like, listening stations or would you like You put them up and then, like…

Mike: When they first started putting them out in the early 2000s, it was part of the air tour management plan that they were putting together. They would do, attended listening just to verify what it was, that they were hearing on the recordings. But for the most part, no, you just set it up, recorded an audio timestamp. You look at your GPS, what's the GPS time in three, two, one clap. It's 11:05. And so that way you can synchronize the, the acoustic recording with the sound pressure level meter.

Dawn: Oh.

Mike: So I mean, that was, but but then you walk away and you don't come back until either you need to service it or you want to download a week's worth of stuff. But yeah, there's very little, we did very little, attended listening.

Dawn: Right on. I was just imagining, like, a couple of scientists, like, sitting out, just, like, really quiet for many hours, you know. And so you were under the flight corridors?

Mike: Yeah.

Dawn: And this was, are these, like Air Tours?

Mike: They’re air tours, right. There are specific areas where the air tours are supposed to fly. There's one over by Desert View at Zuni Point. It goes right over Zuni Point, goes north. There's another one that comes south that goes over the Dragon. It's, peninsula off of the North Rim and goes over, I think it's Bouchet Use Area west of Hermit, Hermits Rest and then east west. That one goes back from the southern end of that it goes back to the Tusayan Airport. At the north, and the Zuni Corridor turns west and goes across the North Rim just north of the Basin.

Melissa: Did you have stations like, all throughout that?

Mike: No, just at the southern end of the Zuni Corridor and the Dragon Corridor. And then we'd set one up in the Basin to catch those three points, because those are more or less the, places where the, we saw the most activity. And it's also where you're going to intercept most of the traffic.

Dawn: Yeah. Just because it's my personal curiosity and I think I'd ask you this before, was that affecting wildlife if it was, like, in what ways?

Mike: Before the air tours were required to fly more than 1000ft above the rim they, and before these air tour corridors were established, they could fly anywhere. And they would typically drop over the rim and fly around below the rim.

Dawn: Yeah.

Mike: And of course, you want to see things. And pilots like to point out wildlife. And there was a grad student at NAU whose master's thesis showed that when a herd of bighorn was harassed if that's the word by, by an air tour it stressed them out there. They didn't have as many, offspring. They didn't have as many young. They were always, they were moving around. So, that's, after the change to the air to recorders that was much reduced. And by putting them up above the rim, I think, that that also reduced the amount of impacts on wildlife.

Dawn: Totally. Yeah. I think when Sarah and I were talking, you had like, described it like the wild west of the sky like before they had the corridors, which boggles my mind.

Mike: Yeah, I was, when I was 12 years old, I flew from Williams over the rim and the pilot dropped us down in and flew us all around. We had, our car broke down and Williams on a big cross-country trip, and that was our way of wasting time while the parts for a Volkswagen bus came up from Phoenix and they actually, the guy, the pilot flew us all over the place. And the whole time he was saying, keep your eye out, my buddy so-and-so is up here too, and I don't know where he is. So there was another pilot flying there right below the rim. Yeah, it was a source of anxiety for sure while we were flying.

Dawn: Wow, dang. It's so different now.

Mike: Very different. And much more popular. I mean, there's a lot more flights now than there were then. And if you're in Bouchet, it's really insane because they're right on top of you the whole time.

Dawn: I can imagine that would, like, affect, a visitor’s or like, just anyone's, like personal experience if they have, like, all these flights going overhead.

Mike: Right.

Dawn: When you were studying soundscapes with interns and stuff, like, was anything like that measured or like.

Mike: No, that took place mostly in a lot of those interviews and studies took place in the early 2000s. They were, they would set up, you know, all across the South and North Rims. They looked at, they recorded in many different places to find out, you know, what was the impact. And, yeah, it was we were just specifically focused on the, the air tour corridors.

Dawn: So I know you had talked about some like interns like when you had interns.

Mike: Oh, yeah.

Dawn: Were there any interns who, like, inspired you or that you learned from or…

Mike: There were there were a number of them. That was one of the joys of my job was working with interns who were fresh out of college or out of their master's degree and excited about the work. And the first two we had were, Maggie and Hannah who basically resurrected the program I had been given the program which had remained, which had been dormant since probably 2010 and this is 2017. They found the gear, they got it working. Th...

Complexity and Quiet – Understanding Soundscapes with Mike Kearsley