The Sounds I Missed While Looking for Butterflies

For three summers, I chased butterflies with a camera. I got some good shots. A swallowtail on a coneflower. A fritillary with its wings backlit. A monarch emerging from a chrysalis, wings crumpled and wet. But I also missed a lot, because I was always looking. Always framing. Always thinking about the next shot.

Then my camera broke. Not dramatically—just a lens that stopped focusing, and a repair estimate that made me laugh out loud. So I stopped taking pictures. I started just sitting.

And that's when I heard it.

The garden, it turns out, is loud. Not loud like traffic or a lawnmower, but loud like a conversation you've been talking over for years without realizing it.

The Soundtrack of a Living Garden

Bees have a pitch. Did you know that? Different species hum at different frequencies. The bumblebees in my garden are low and thrummy, like a cello. The honeybees are higher, more insistent. The tiny native bees—the ones that live in the ground and the stems—are almost silent, just a faint whisper of wings.

Wasps click. I never noticed this until I stopped looking. When a wasp lands on a leaf, its feet make a tiny tick-tick-tick sound, like someone tapping a pencil. It's not aggressive. It's just... there. A small announcement.

Grasshoppers rasp. Crickets trill. Katydids—which I didn't even know lived in my yard—call back and forth at dusk, a rising and falling rhythm that sounds like a question and an answer.

And then there are the sounds that aren't insects at all. The rustle of a lizard in the leaf litter. The soft churr of a hummingbird's wings as it hovers at the salvia. The thunk of a frog jumping into the pond, followed by the silence of a frog hoping you didn't see it.

I spent so long trying to capture the garden in images that I forgot it was a place, not a picture. A place has sounds. A place has weather. A place has time.

Learning to Listen Again

I still take photos sometimes. I borrowed a camera from a friend for a week and got a few shots I'm proud of. But I don't carry it with me every day anymore. I carry a notebook instead, and I write down what I hear.

This morning, for example: a cardinal singing his heart out from the top of the cedar. The drone of a neighbor's lawnmower, far enough away to be background music. The crunch of a beetle in the leaf litter. And then, unmistakable, the flutter of wings—a question mark butterfly, landing on the rotten banana I'd left on the patio table.

I heard it before I saw it. That's new for me. That's the gift of putting down the camera and picking up the habit of paying attention.

If you're a gardener, or a birder, or just someone who likes to sit outside with a cup of coffee, I want to recommend something: go outside without a device. Just once. Sit for ten minutes. Don't look for anything. Just listen.

The garden has been talking this whole time. We just have to stop taking pictures long enough to hear it.