Around The World

To introduce ‘A life in Sound’, Martyn circumnavigates the globe through 7 major themes. We’ll explore the sounds of his youth, what it is to feel Awe, Close calls in the Masai Mara, Activist encounters in Taiji, sounds he didn’t expect to record like the heartbeat of a tree, moments that almost got away from him… and all the way back to LOVE.

Leaving Birmingham behind, Martyn began a global quest that led him to the most serene and startling sounds of the natural world. From his childhood memories filled with his mother's piano playing and the hooting of owls to his deep connection with nature, Stewart's narrative is as intricate as the soundscapes he records. His reflections on his introverted nature and the facade he puts on reveal a man who, despite his shyness, possesses a bold spirit driven by his profound love for the natural world.

This episode transcends borders and connects the heart with the sounds of nature. Martyn guides us through an exploration that's not just about the wild environments he has captured but also about the journey of self-discovery that came with it.  From the untouched majesty of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, caribou migrations and grizzly bears through to an unforgettable adventure in the Masai Mara. 

Martyn’s tales are not limited to grand landscapes; they also include intimate encounters with the creatures of the planet. He shares moving stories of his dogs, the silent gratitude in their eyes, and the whisper of partnership formed with nature. These anecdotes emphasize the unspoken bond between humans and the environment and serve as a poignant reminder of our deep-rooted love for the Earth.
 
 The technical aspects of sound recording in the wild are not overlooked. Listeners are given a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the challenges and unexpected elements that come with capturing the perfect sound. From a crocodile encounter to the distressing experience of documenting dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan, Stewart does not shy away from the darker side of humanity and the emotional toll it takes on him.
 
 Every chapter of the podcast is interspersed with the authentic sense of Martyn’s voice and passion. His narration is compelling, drawing the listener into his world of sound and emotion. The stories he tells are a testament to his activism and the impact that a single person can have on raising awareness about environmental issues.

www.thelisteningplanet.com

Transcript

Martyn
Host
00:01
This is Martin Stewart, with a life in sound from the listening planet. 

Amanda
Host
00:13
I'm Amanda Hill and I'm here with world-renowned nature sound recordist and archivist, martin Stewart, who also happens to be my uncle, and our goal over this series is to take listeners on a journey through the natural world, all through the medium of sound, but at the same time, I want to enable a glimpse into the life of a man who recorded everything you're going to hear, one sound at a time. Martin's journey spans 68 years. It will go from a council estate in Birmingham, england, and ultimately take him to every corner of the planet, from Belize to the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, from Denali to the Galapagos, to some of the most inhospitable of locations geographically and politically. He will be attacked by lions and crocodiles, arrested in Japan for filming the annual dolphin slaughter, and then find himself in long periods of isolation in remote corners of the world waiting for just 30 seconds of a birdsong. 

01:01
This is ultimately a love story. This is ultimately a love story. It's such a hard question like who is martin stewart right? What? Who is he and what does he stand for? And who is this man? How would you, how would you want me, as your niece, to describe you to the world? Like how do you want to be remembered, martin? 

Martyn
Host
01:19
I wouldn't be able to describe myself to you. We we've had years and years and history together and for me to explain who I am to someone like you, that would mean there would be no relationship, because you know me as you. You know me better than most of my family and if I was to describe myself, I would write a bunch of bullshit and put it out there, because that's what you're supposed to do. But I'm very introverted. I'm very shy. In many ways. 

01:54
There's an exterior. There's a part of me that has a false exterior. It's like a facade, and growing up in my family, you were always made to feel stupid. You were always insignificant. You were always that person and I'm not moaning about that at all because it taught me how to deal with that. I never had problems, issues with mental issues or I didn't have anxiety. I never had that with mental issues or I didn't have anxiety. I never had that. But I always used to feel so scared about having to put myself forward and I do that. And yet when I go into a room, if I'm in a bar or a pub or a club or a group of people, I'm extroverted. It's the craziest thing. 

02:42
I want everybody to know I'm there, but when I go away I want to shut the door. I just just have that and it's exhausting at times. I remember so many times, so many family parties where you think, when the door was shut, at the end of it you just you know that's, that's done now. And I think I'm one of these type of people and I think you are in a little way that when you know you've got to do something, wish it wasn't coming and you kind of think, fuck it, I've got to deal with this now, and then take a deep breath and say what you've got to do, and then move on with it. 

Amanda
Host
03:23
Where do you think it comes from in that you feel the world very deeply, martin. I mean, one of the things that you and I have done a lot together over the last few years is just cry and you feel, and not because we're even talking about things that are sad, just because of the way there's a depth of feeling that you carry with you into everything that you do, into any conversation that you have, and to express you as a passionate person, as somebody who cares deeply about the natural world but you also love deeply and I do love deeply and I think you're right. 

Martyn
Host
03:57
I love. I love a lot of things, things that I really love, I treasure. I never take anything for granted. I find presence and beauty in so many things, but the things that I feel beauty and love in when I see that hurt. It hurts me deep and I get very affected by it. 

04:21
You know I talk about my illness. Nature is there again for me to be able to get myself through this. Nobody else is there and I say that old cliche I'm a voice for the voiceless and I've used that through my activism to everything that nature said to me. Whether she whispers with a breeze of wind through the leaves or the waves on the ocean, she's telling me that she's present every single day of my life and if I ever need that medicine, I can go to her and I don't need a credit card and I don't need a insurance card to to get that medicine from her. She gives it freely and I'm very conscious of that, that I have to fight for her. I have to make sure that she's strong and I have to make sure that people know that she needs help. It isn't just you know, she's not just there. We need to make sure we know she's there. My love for nature is deep from when I was a kid. 

Amanda
Host
05:25
And I'd almost like to start there, martin. I've asked you to pick out the impossible, which is seven sounds that represent the last seven decades of your life, but the first sound I've asked you to think about is a sound that represents your youth. 

Martyn
Host
05:42
That is so hard I think it was a man-made sound that I could remember my mum as I've said before, it was a disrupted family that I came from and when my mum was happy it seemed to be a good feeling in the house. If she had money for a cigarette or a drink or whatever, she was happy and it would give that kind of vibe. So I always remember her on the piano and there was always a piece of music she played Fleur de Lis, I used to think that was the name of a steak and kidney pie. My bedroom used to face the front where the fields were and there used to be an oak tree. In the middle of the cornfields there was a cornfield, a hedgerow, an oak tree, another cornfield and then the bluebell woods and in the middle of the night I could hear the owl hooting from the tree and I always knew that guy was there and it was almost like, you know, the uh, the waltons at night saying night jumble, night harry, night dave, whatever their names were, and I would hear that owl and I would say, okay, the owl's still there and he's hooting. And he hooted all the time and he always brought a smile to my face. There was always that combine harvester you still listen to that in the fields and when you knew that the machine was in the fields there would be hay to gather up and then to make dens and be a part of nature in the fields and just have that smell of it. So it was an auditory thing and a smell as well. It was two of your senses. 

07:31
I used to love messing around in the fields. I loved, even though for everything that was poor and bad, I loved my youth, I loved it, I absolutely loved it. So I would say it's a mixture of those sounds. I would go back. It's. It's a hard question to to answer. I'm sure, if I give it a bit more thought, there would be, you know, a lot of other bits and pieces, probably the sound, the electricity coming back on, knowing that you got light and warm. You know you would hear a clunk of the of the electric meter go so you knew you were back, or the coin that went into the meter to give you another two hours of of warmth. 

Amanda
Host
08:13
So many things that you go back in time when you listen to something do you feel that the sounds have always had an imprint in your mind, that the way that you remember sounds even from when you're younger? It's almost as though you bring them back to the present, that you remember them as vividly now as you did back then it's almost like a guide, it's almost like something that is there to remind you to keep your feet on the floor. 

Martyn
Host
08:42
The sound of a milk bottle being put down in the green grocer's shop, knowing you're going to get a penny back and you could buy a bubble gum. You know, and you had those and the bag. When you'd walk down to the grocer's shop and you'd hear the milk bottles clinking together there's lots of little the milk float, the milkmen that come up, and you heard the handbrake come on when he stopped and then he would whistle as he walked up the entry to somewhere with his milk bottles in the carrier. 

Amanda
Host
09:15
It's almost the way that you describe it is, and maybe this is also the way that you still record is it's more the soundscape rather than the sounds. You've got the individual sounds, but they all come together to create this incredible, vivid picture of life, and there's something about when you talk about your youth and the colour that comes with those different sounds all put together. Um, I'm gonna move on to the second sound. I asked you to, and it could be a soundscape. It doesn't need to just be a sound, but I asked you to and it could be a soundscape. It doesn't need to just be a sound, but I asked you to pick a sound that just represents pure awe. 

Martyn
Host
09:52
I think anything, anything basically without man-made noises in, makes me feel complete. It gives that feeling of tranquility. I think tranquility sums up most of the things that we want to be. We want to be in a tranquil environment. When I go and record places, the thing that upsets me the most is if I hear the intrusion of man-made noises, so I feel completely in awe. I'll give you a strong example. When Ru and I left Washington State and went to Costa Rica, we were building the houses where we were going to live and I was building this beautiful studio and while the builders were on the property, I went off in a 4x4 into the rainforest and I put my mics out there and I sat there for maybe two hours and in that two hours there was a motorbike that came through just one motorbike and I came back and I said to Rue I've just died and woke up in heaven. I couldn't imagine that that thing would be on the doorstep. 

11:03
It was just like, wow, rue was amazing, rue was brilliant. She supported everything I did with stuff, but she never really got it. She didn't get what that meant to me. If I went out to record something and I was out for five, six hours, you know I'd get up at four in the morning and then I'd tiptoe down. I'd get up at four in the morning and then I'd tiptoe down, I'd have my bag ready. 

11:29
the night before get into the car and unfortunately when you turn the engine on it would make a noise. But I'd drive off and Rue couldn't get out of bed in the morning. She was awful to get out of bed, so she'd never join me on any of those journeys and things like that. If we went on holiday she'd stay in the hotel and I'd be out doing stuff. But when I'd come back she'd say any good, oh, my god, I got this amazing vocalization of peregrine fal or whatever. You know, what else did you get? That was it. How long was that? It must have been 35, 40 seconds. You've been out for six hours and you're happy because you got 40 seconds of sound. And she couldn't understand that. But I'd play it, you know. I'd say, would you come and listen to this? And she'd get it. She'd say, wow, that's cool. But what else did you do? What else did you do? Or you know, going back the other way, if you want to say what sound makes you feel worse, I'd go to a place and there'd be planes going through. 

12:47
I went through a period of anxiety. I didn't know how to deal with it. All my beautiful places where I used to go, man started to encroach. Infrastructure would come in, flight paths would get busier, roads would be closer, people would build a house, you know, in the forest and there'd be a chicken making a noise or a dog barking and I had to deal with that I. I went through a lot of issues with that was there? 

Amanda
Host
13:18
um, tell me, tell me about the story of who. What was that story? You once said about someone that stayed in a bed and breakfast or a hotel? Oh yeah, and it was too quiet yeah, that's my good friend, bernie kraus. 

Martyn
Host
13:32
They uh, before the fires in sonoma, they had, um, a beautiful house on about 10, 15 acres of land with, uh, eucalyptus trees, and Bernie had a studio just out, just the side of the house, and above the studio was a little flatlet, so they rented it out for B&B and breakfast and there was a family from New York that turned up and they booked for a week and the next morning when Bernie came out, kat was cooking breakfast and Bernie came out and the suitcases were at the bottom of the stairs and he said you know what's the problem? 

14:13
And the guy said you know, we, we can't stay here. And he said is there a problem with the room? Said no, it's just too quiet. It's too quiet. He said we live in new york. We can't, we can't deal with the silence, we can't sleep. So bernie said give me tonight. He went into the studio and he created a cd of taxi cabs and horns and trucks and dustbins and all that sort of stuff and and put the CD in the player at the side of the bed and they played it through the night and they stayed the week. 

Amanda
Host
14:51
So you want silence and other people can't quite cope with it. 

Martyn
Host
14:54
Other people can't do it. 

Amanda
Host
14:56
Tell me. When it comes to all, though, Martin as well, is there something you've recorded so much, but is there anything that has just blown your mind where all, for me, is also just such sheer wonder? What I love about you is that you find awe in everything, so to ask you what makes you feel awe inspired? You list off every single sound, but is there something where even you have sat and felt just the kind of epicness of the natural world, or when I, something that really made you sit when I was a kid when we had television programs, when we had a television and electricity. 

Martyn
Host
15:37
I remember seeing a program on the arctic national wildlife refuge and the caribou migration and I think it was David Attenborough that was talking on it but it might have been one of the earlier naturalists and there were these beautiful wolf packs and Arctic foxes and musk, oxen and grizzly bear and and tundra and for miles and miles and these beautiful mountains that looked over the coastal plain and I was knocked away with that. I used to love things like Zoo Time and the Great Life and programs that the BBC used to put out and I'd sit there for ages and ages and watch that and I thought, god, I'd love to go to America and see that the BBC used to put out. And I'd sit there for ages and ages and watch that and I thought, god, I'd love to go to America and see that. I'd love to do that. Whereas most people think about going to America to go to Disneyland. You know I couldn't give a shit about Mickey Mouse or any of that stuff. That's not, that wasn't me. That's fairgrounds and that's, you know, rides on merry-go-rounds. I couldn't be arsed with that. But later in my life, in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and flew from Seattle up to Fairbanks and then from Fairbanks to Cactovic, which is an Inuit village, the furthest north of North America, and I waited the next day and the bush plane took me out to the Brooks range and dumped me in this place. 

17:16
I'd seen when I was seven, eight, and I could feel my pulse, I could feel the blood running through my veins and I could talk and nobody was there to interrupt and I could hear stuff and I could all my senses Were you by yourself. I thought this must be what it's like to be your primal self. This must be how it is. This must be my equivalent of something spiritual. I don't believe in God, I don't believe in any of that, but I felt very spiritual then. That was a feeling that I've never had before. I've never had before. 

18:05
I experienced wilderness. This was wilderness Made me understand the importance of wilderness. It was me giving my own lesson. I wasn't reading it from a book and I wasn't listening from somebody else, but all these components of the refuge, they belonged where they were Algae and mosses, grasses, and there were turrets and there were cliff faces and there were beautiful views and then bears walking through the tundra and caribou on a migration pattern that they've been doing for probably thousands of years, and I was part of that landscape and when I left there I couldn't deal with it. There was cars going around, taxis and buses and I'd just spent 21 days in paradise. 

18:56
I went back four or five times after that and worked on the refuge to try and bring you know the idea that this place is important. And I I wrote a story or I did a podcast about the arctic national wildlife and the importance of wilderness and I said there and then you don't have to go to the arctic national wildlife refuge, but you have to believe that we need to have wilderness there. If we can't protect that area, that space, that wilderness, we can't protect anything. And that lesson is not, you know, doesn't get learned enough. It's insignificant. 

19:39
And when I saw senators argue for the idea that they should go and drill in that sacred place, the argument was a guy held up. I think his name was Ted Stevens, the Republican senator for Alaska, and he held up a white poster board on the Senate floor and he said make no bones about it, this is what the Arctic National Wildlife wildlife refuge looks like 12 months a year and I was able to refute that shit. We, we put a book together and we showed beautiful flowers, carpets of flowers, migratory birds, dawn choruses, musk, oxen, polar bear, grizzly bear it was. I got goosebumps now talking about it who did you get a letter from? 

20:30
we did a book called arctic wings and, um, jimmy carter put the foreword to the book and I got it was published by the mountaineers books in seattle and I had this letter sent to me um, very official, I thought I hadn't paid my tax or something you know. I was like, oh my god, and it was from jimmy carter and he said that him and his wife listened to my cd which was in the book every night to go to sleep, to it's amazing sound, and I put the letter in one of the copies of the arctic wings books. I can't find it anywhere. 

Amanda
Host
21:08
It must be in costa rica, but I don't know how we're going to beat the arctic wildlife refuge, okay, so, um, the third sound that I want us to, or soundscape I want to talk about, is a close call, because there are many martin in life and we'll probably do a whole episode on close calls, but I'd like you to pick one please. 

Martyn
Host
21:31
I was in Africa working. I had to go and record the Masamuri River that went through, and so I had a night vision camera, a thermal camera, and I went to the sides of the river and I looked through to see what was around so I could be safe. And there was hippos and there was, you know, lots of birds along the bank and no crocodiles. I have goosebumps just you telling me this story. And I took my microphone and my trusted cables and I put a microphone aside and I put a microphone here and I ran the cable and this crocodile flew out of the water. And I tell people that I did a backward somersault 15 times. You know, like Olga Corbett, I didn't, I just scrambled like shit to try and get out of the way and this thing came out of the water and as it went back in the water it pulled the cables and my microphones with it. So what am I? 

Amanda
Host
22:41
going to do. 

Martyn
Host
22:44
I frightened the shit out of me. 

Amanda
Host
22:46
You can't be worrying about the cables at that point. Well, I had to have my mics to work. 

Martyn
Host
22:54
And when I was talking to the guys, there's a director guy there. He said did you check for crocodiles? And I said yes, of course I did. He said what did you do? I said I took the camera with the thermal camera. And what did you? Check for crocodiles? And I said yes, of course I did. So what did you do? I said I took the camera with the thermal camera. And what did you do? And I said I I checked those hippos and there's stuff down the river, so you didn't see any crocodiles. I said no. I said well, you wouldn't have done, because they're cold-blooded animals. Why didn't you shine the? 

23:21
torch and of course I said I knew that. And when you shone the torch there's a million eyes looking at you. I've had knives in my throat in Japan. I've had machine guns stuck down in my mouth in Mozambique because we were trying to expose illegal fishing going on. And I'm manning the truck while there's a guy in the water swimming down to a boat to put a transponder on it so we could monitor what was going on. And Chuck turns up with these guys with machine guns and he said to me I would look good with holes in my face and it was the best cure you could ever have about this it was the best cure you could ever have for constipation that when you get a machine gun in your face and there's a guy with oh, martin, okay, so tell me. 

Amanda
Host
24:21
So we're gonna have a whole episode just on close calls and a whole episode on some of your activist adventures. But can you pick one activist journey for me? 

Martyn
Host
24:35
Seal clubbing in Namibia was upsetting, watching young pups taken away from their mother and then slaughtered for their health. I cried a lot watching that and I had to keep myself together. I think one thing that moved me the most was maybe the first time I went to Japan to cover the dolphin slaughter in the cove and there was a hunt this one day. They go out in the mornings and they go out into international waters and they use sanding rods to disorientate pods of dolphins and bring them into this infamous cove in Taiji and they corralled about 90 Pacific Striped Dolphins and brought them in. And so this confusion that was going on. The police are watching everything you do and they were watching me because I was documenting everything but nobody went there with sound equipment. I was the only guy who turned up there with sound equipment and I put a hydrophone in the water. What you heard was screams and snapping shrimp and as they slaughtered each dolphin one by one, the velocity of the dolphin calls started to diminish until it was just the sound of snapping shrimp and I called that soundscape Dolphins no More. 

26:11
The pure ignorance of what was going on with that. And it's only a small amount of fishermen that kill them. It's not population of japan, it's not the whole population of taiji, and a lot of people get on that bandwagon. That's saying you know the japanese are doing this. Well, it's not the japanese, it's a few fishermen, but ill-educated. They consider dolphins as pests and out in the ocean eating their fish. They eat fish and not fish and they consider them fish. They reproduce their young every two, three years. And the amount of killing that's going on with these dolphins we're going to see extinction in the water very soon. I've probably witnessed in five times. I went to japan um, maybe close on 600 dolphins that was slaughtered and it's pretty hard to to take. I'll say one more on top of that. We can talk about this on a later time. 

27:06
I went to nepal cover a sacrificial ceremony where they killed every five years 500 000 mammals by decapitating their heads and I recorded the sounds of these beautiful animals being slaughtered by, I would say, maniac warriors with their machetes and I took a picture of this one calf that was standing on its mother's body with a red scarf around its neck and made a National Geographic cover on the magazine and it told the story. The sound also told the horror story, but I mean the more I think about about it. 

Amanda
Host
27:46
There's so many things I did, you know, with activism sadly, sadly, uh, sadly, too many, right, all the ones that you didn't get and that you didn't record. And I'm going to pivot from that, um, and ask you about a sound or soundscapes that you didn't expect. So many of the things you've got into the natural world to do were very intentional. You had a mission to go and record them, to go find them. Is there something that you never expected and found, or a sound that you never even thought was possible? And yet somehow you came across. 

Martyn
Host
28:21
I always adopt the attitude of expect the unexpected. I always think if you prepare for the unexpected. It's all to do with levels and how you configure your recorder as well. That's a hard one. I think I've had critters that have turned up in the microphone that I didn't expect them to be there. I recorded a jaguar. 

Amanda
Host
28:44
I quite like the idea of that, martin. They're just like why are you not interested in me? What's wrong with me? Why are you going for the big? 

Martyn
Host
28:50
ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you hear something. When you're in tropical rainforests, you hardly ever see the bird or the frog or the toad or the insect your heart, you just hear it and the visual part of it is just dense foliage. And when you hear something that's just amazing, like a musician ring and you wonder what the hell is that you know, and then you don't know what that is, because this is the first time you've ventured in there. Or you hear a pendular go, use its cyrix to the full and the frequency range and you capture that. Or a lightning bolt, or you know a thunder crash, and when you get those, you oh, my God. And then when you capture that, and you've actually done it, you haven't just gone out and held a microphone and those. That's the wonder of of nature, because there's always something unexpected that's going to turn up tell me about the, the recording bats and the sound that you encountered oh, there, there's, there's one. 

29:56
You know exactly, exactly that. I was recording bats in Yuba Pass in California. There was a sound class. I was giving a talk and we were out in this meadow area on the night and there's bats everywhere. It's just flying. You know, they're drab, they're grey, nobody sees them. 

30:19
To identify bats you have to be with a biologist, you have to have a rabies injection because the fear of getting rabies, and you erect what they call a mist net so that the bats will fly into the mist net. And then you capture the bats and identify them and then record their vocalizations by putting a bungee cord glued to their back and running along the zip line, so that when it runs along the zip line it's emitting these calls. And then you record the calls so that you know what's in the area, so then you can identify from the, from the signature, the sound signature itself. So there was this interference all the time and because you with a bat detector, it's what they call a heterodyne system. It brings a frequency that is inaudible to us and brings it down to an audible pitch so that we can identify it. So it lowers the frequency of the bat and it sounds more like a squeaky chair or something, but there was something that was pulsating. What is that? And the closer I got to this tree, the noisier this frequency got. So I discovered it was the tree that was making this sound. And when you got close to it I put hydrophone into the tree and a mic sensor and there was a rhythmic pulse and it was the xylem and the tree sucking up the water and in a drought it was giving different vibes. 

31:49
So it was part of my arsenal really to when I went to countries to record, I always took a hydrophone with me so that if I was by water I could monitor what was in the water or the ponds or the lakes, and also I would record the trees. And the trees are the ones that I believe that, the trees that were around Auschwitz. What if you could sit with a tree and say you know, these trees are years old, like the redwoods, for instance. You've got 500 years a story they could tell. It'd be like sitting with your grandad and being able to dig them up. 

32:28
Put all the parts back together and say tell me a story about this time and I form my own stories. I'm not very good at putting this into words, but I know what makes me feel like this is special, and I told the story from the noise that tree was making, about the story of the jews and and ashford itself, and if you could speak, you'd be able to tell the truth of what, what happened around here, and I go into those deep kind of sessions. I did it in Chernobyl after the leak. 12 years after that there was also a beautiful dawn chorus. That happened with frogs and our birds as well, because a lot of their birds were the same birds that you find in the UK the blackbirds out there singing away but these trees were telling stories. 

Amanda
Host
33:22
Explain why you went to Chernobyl, because that's fascinating. 

Martyn
Host
33:25
Well, there was Chernobyl had the leak. It was the reactor that that leaked. It was one of the worst catastrophes in Europe, I think the present day. And, um, everything became radioactive and that place became a ghost town. I took pictures and there's buildings everywhere and they're desolate. There's nobody there and when you turned up, you had to have a geiger counter with you so that you could monitor the radioactivity. That was there. Actually, if you stop one on me now, I'd be going through the roof, um, and these trees were thriving. Nature was reclaiming back what she would, what she was cleared away from 10 years ago, whereas you got a, you know, a reactor base there. There's no trees, there was nothing, and it was almost like nobody thought the trees would survive, right? 

34:15
nobody would and a friend of a friend of ours did uh hiroshima too, you know, when the bomb dropped and went into the forest around uh hiroshima and did the same with the trees. They tell the same story. They were able to stand through that disaster. I think nature does that. Everywhere we go, she's telling a story yeah she's telling us a story now. You put a microphone out and if you compare what you did 20 years before, you know there's something's missing tell me um a sound or a soundscape that you almost never got. 

Amanda
Host
34:52
What? What almost got away from you? What about the? Uh? What about martin, the, the fact that you're colorblind? Isn't there a story where one almost got away because you couldn't see it? 

Martyn
Host
35:04
oh that. So that was that was with rue in uh, big ben national park. Um, we were looking for the kalima warbler and you park regulations were that you had to get a permit if you record. It was ridiculous. If you wanted to record something which you don't take away physically, all you do is you leave a footprint but you had to have a permit to go and record. You could walk in there as a public and listen to it, but if you pointed a mic at it you had to have a permit. 

35:37
So we didn't do a permit, we. We just took our microphones up and look for this kalima warbler and it was a certain color that I can't identify. I'm, I'm shit with greens and browns and reds, and rue can see it. So she knew the target bird we were after and I was saying we were walking up for miles off this bloody hill in the Chisell Mountains and I said I think that's the Kalima Warbler Because I could hear the voice going off. And she said we passed one of those bloody things further down and didn't know it was a Kalima Warbler further down and didn't know it was a Kalima warbler. And the funny thing was we were so dehydrated, we were so exhausted that on the way down the hill back to the bottom she dreamed she saw a water tower and she said there's water over there and it didn't exist. We were that exhausted. 

Amanda
Host
36:42
But I got the Kalima warbler in here. 

Martyn
Host
36:43
I was trying to find a bird that you couldn't actually see, until it made a noise and she'd seen the damn thing on the tree on the way up. 

Amanda
Host
36:52
Oh, it's so funny. The last sound I'm going to ask you for is just one that represents love for you that's. 

Martyn
Host
37:02
I think that's probably the hardest one. I think, if I can go back to activism, it makes you understand love a lot more about the things that I've done. I think when you lose something, you realize the magnitude of how much love that you have for something. That and love is. Love is feeling good, love is real. Love is listening. Love can be touched. Love is all around when you're in nature. Love is, love is beautiful. 

37:34
Love is not just a four letter word. It's not something that I use very lightly. I think love is. Love to me is nature itself and the things that are special to me. If we're talking about sound, I think it's unconditional love with nature itself. I can't not put that into any other category. I think that's the only way. 

38:03
I love the sound of nature. I love the sound of the sea. I love the ocean. I love the People, love music. People use music as something to relax to and to associate maybe a song with their partner. Maybe you dance to a song at a wedding. That's very special between the two of you. I have that marriage since I was a kid that it doesn't matter what partner I've been with. I'm always going to love that one thing. Love is a fine line between hate as well, and the love of nature brings a hatred of me that anybody that tries to destroy that's a hard one really I think a lot about um stories that you told me over the years, and and maybe one of the deepest relationships I've ever seen with you is with water. 

Amanda
Host
38:55
I mean, you could tell the story about the hawaiian crow, you could tell the story about so many different encounters you've had where you've seen love in nature. But I always feel that when you're by the water that there's something that that spiritually connects you to, to the calm, to its strength, to its just um vastness, expansiveness, sense of possibility. But there is. 

Martyn
Host
39:19
Energy. 

Amanda
Host
39:20
There's an energy, and I think you've taught me, you've shown me so many examples over the years, martin, of when people have questioned whether animals can love, and examples of absolutely how clearly they can. But I've also seen nature love you back deeply in the last few years? 

Martyn
Host
39:36
Oh, absolutely, and it's unconditional. You know it doesn't ask for much when you think of chips, when you finish and you sit down on the floor and the unconditional love that he gives or she. 

Amanda
Host
39:53
She why don't we thinking of love? Why don't we end with one final story, which is love? And I'd love you to tell the story of the dog that you rescued, and if you wouldn't mind, I had the fortune of being able to have some amazing companions in my life. 

Martyn
Host
40:13
I lost a very special dog that I got in Scotland called Mitch, and I named him after one of my favourite films, the Ring of Bright Water. Where Gavin Maxwell lived up in Camasferna in Scotland, close to the Isle of Skye, and Midge was the otter he took from a pet shop in London and took him into the wild and he learnt about it and he painted it and he wrote stories and poems and I called this dog Midge because he made the same sounds as the otter itself Pretty cool and I lost him when I came to America. 

40:50
He died of lung cancer and it was really hard to get over. I still have his ashes with me. He'll go where I want to go. Then we had Pickle and he was a special boy and he gave us 13 beautiful years. But I was asked to go and cover document the closing of a dog meat farm in South Korea and I had no idea of the history of the abuse of these dog meat farms. And I met a beautiful girl who was associated with the Humane Society International and we've been friends on Facebook for a long time and she said would you come and film and record the closing down of this dog meat? 

Amanda
Host
41:38
farm so. 

Martyn
Host
41:38
So I said yes, of course, and she showed me some footage about what to expect and I had no idea that they were farming dogs for the dinner table and the extent of it 20,000 dog meat farms with 2 million dogs on them. So this one place, we ended up in Seoul and we drove two and a half hours away from Seoul. We ended up in the countryside and a horrific factory farm with these dogs called Tosa's. They call them Tosa's, it's more or less like a Japanese mastiff, but it's big and there was 112 dogs on this farm and they'd never seen water, they'd never been, they'd never walked on grass, they were fed intestines and they were emaciated. And as I was walking up and down the cages, I saw this one dog in in a dark tunnel and he couldn't look at me. His head was bowed like he was shamed and he was beaten. He had scars, he had a rip in his ear and I said to the organiser there what's going to happen with him. I said, well, he's going to be a special case because he needs rehabilitating. And I said, can I take him? And she said that I'll ask Humane Society International if you can do it. 

43:01
So I went about documenting everything else. And every morning when I turned up, we were there for like five days. I sat with this dog, this cage, and he started to look at me and I opened the door and I sat with him and I stroked him and he was in a cage that was raised from the floor, never left the cage. The excrement fell from the cage to the floor, so underneath the cage was a mountain of faeces, flies everywhere, no water, all he was fed was intestines and shit the mincer that was outside. And then we started putting these dogs into crates and then taking them to the airport. I said I'm going to call this dog Pocket and he will be Pocket for change. He will educate people around the world of the atrocities that was going on in these dog meat farms. And I kept him close with me and I took him to the airport and for the last three days he watched everything I did. 

44:00
When I was walking around filming stuff, I could see Pocket looking at me and we took 100 of these dogs to California and 12 went to Washington State and I went to pick 12 of the dogs, including Pocket, at the border of Oregon and Washington State and brought them back to a place called Paws where he was inoculated. Yeah, and he came home and when we brought him home, it's the first time he'd ever been on grass and he, he was the most beautiful animal. He died a couple of years ago. He ate something while in Costa Rica bloated his stomach, but before that nutrition didn't exist in him. He had spinal problems, he had digestive problems. We, we put him through all the best care and everything we did, and we built a house for him, because he couldn't walk up steps and the house was pocket's house, so that it was all one level and you met him you know he was, he was just, he was just the most amazing dog. 

45:11
And he again you know this is he taught me humility. He taught me whatever you're going through, it doesn't matter. Look what I've gone through and I'm happy, I can wag my tail and you're feeding me and I'm showing you love. He didn't say you know, the Koreans treated you bad and I couldn't stand this. I couldn't stand that he didn't have a dossier on a species. He didn't have hatred in his head at all, he had love and he licked me in the face. He wouldn't lick anyone else, he licked me in the face and everywhere I went he was stuck to me like glue and he is the most beautiful dog, I think. 

45:53
And we had bucket. You know, about three months before I said to Roo I'm bringing Pocket home and she said what, what are you going to do? And when he turned up she didn't realize he was the size of a horse and we called his nickname was Horse. You know he was beautiful. But there's a lesson from everything, from a bird that sings on a wire, a bird that sings in a tree to a frog that gets stuck in a pond In the pool at the back here. 

46:21
Then you get satisfaction from everything there. There's no news bulletins, there's no problems. They're just there for you and they give unconditional love. Some don't show it. A wasp will probably come and sting you and you'd say, but they're here for a, but these, they're here for a reason. They're here for a reason and we just have to find out what that is and they make beautiful sounds that was brilliant. 

46:50
Thank you, that was really really good you've just experienced another journey on the listening planet podcast. Dive deeper into the world of natural sounds by connecting with us online. Visit our website or follow us on social media. Let the symphony of nature surround you wherever you go. Happy listening.