The Sound of Extinction: How Disappearing Animals Take Silence With Them

Jun 1

The world is getting quieter.

Not in the peaceful, meditative way. Not like the hush after snowfall or the calm of a windless morning.

No…this is a different kind of silence.
A haunted one. A silence made from subtraction.
The kind of quiet you only hear after something important stops making noise.

That’s extinction.

Not just the end of a body, a bloodline, a biome. But the vanishing of a sound.

The croak that used to echo from a swamp.
The call that once danced across trees at dawn.
The hum of fish navigating a reef that no longer sings.

This is the sound of extinction.

And today, it’s getting louder by going quiet.

When a Birdsong Vanishes, Who Notices?

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was a small Hawaiian honeyeater bird with a song so beautiful, it could make your chest tighten. We only have a few scratchy audio recordings of it now. One of the last males was heard calling out for a mate…over and over…until he stopped.

No answer ever came.

And with his silence, the species was gone.

Can grief echo across species? Can sound record the moment loneliness becomes extinction?

That’s what his call did.
A ghost note.
A final lullaby into silence.

We often think of extinction in terms of bodies: dead animals, vanished populations, crumbling habitats. But what if we thought of it as the end of a soundtrack?

Not just a silent forest, but one where certain silences don’t feel right. Where something that should be calling…isn’t.

Coral Reefs Go Quiet Before They Die

Coral reefs are not the still, silent gardens they seem from afar.

They buzz.
They click.
They hum.

Tiny shrimp pop like bubble wrap. Fish chatter with grunts, croaks, and crackles. Crabs tap against rock. It’s a symphony…just beneath the waves.

And when coral starts to bleach, when the ecosystem begins to die?

The sound drops off. Dramatically.

Marine biologists use underwater microphones (hydrophones) to monitor reef health. Healthy reefs are noisy. Dying reefs are eerily quiet.

A study off the Great Barrier Reef found that fish larvae, which use reef sounds to navigate back home, avoided degraded reefs because they sounded…wrong. Like static. Or worse: like nothing at all.

So reefs aren’t just dying. They’re becoming sonic deserts: places where sound used to be, and now isn’t.

Frogs Call Into Nothingness

Frogs are among the first species to vanish when ecosystems shift. They are sensitive, fragile, and often forgotten.

They also sing.

Their calls fill wetlands like rain fills leaves. Mating songs, territory songs, survival songs. A single marsh can host a dozen distinct frog calls, overlapping in a kind of musical chaos.

But now, in many places, frogs call alone.

Climate change, pesticides, and disease have thinned their ranks. In some regions, males still call, but their mates are gone. And like the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, their calls bounce into nothing.

This is not just a tragedy. It’s an acoustic rupture.

When enough species disappear, the soundscape changes fundamentally. And for animals that rely on sound to live, that can mean more extinction. It's a grief loop. A silencing cycle.

Sound as Memory, and the Grief of Silence

Sound is one of the strongest triggers of memory in humans.

A certain birdcall can bring back childhood. The drone of cicadas can summon a long-dead summer. The hoot of an owl might echo with your grandmother’s stories or a night hike that changed you.

So when those sounds vanish, we don’t just lose animals.

We lose parts of ourselves.

Conservationists talk about the “shifting baseline syndrome”, the idea that each generation sees a degraded world as normal because they never knew what came before.

The same is true for sound.

You don’t miss a birdsong you’ve never heard.
You don’t notice the frogs that should be calling.
You accept the silence as natural. But it’s not.

It’s not natural.
It’s not normal.
It’s absence pretending to be peace.

Acoustic Ecology: Listening to What’s Gone

Acoustic ecology is the study of natural soundscapes: how animals, landscapes, and even weather create an audible fingerprint of an environment.

Researchers now use this science to track biodiversity loss. With remote recording stations, they can monitor rainforests, oceans, and deserts, even when humans aren’t there.

And the results?

The world is losing its sounds.

Some ecosystems are 40% quieter than they were just twenty years ago.

Not because of less weather, less wind, or fewer insects, but because fewer animals remain to make sound. And the quiet left behind is thick. Heavy. Like mourning air.

What Does a World Without Sound Look Like?

Let’s imagine something.

You walk into a forest.

It’s green.
It’s lush.
It’s alive.

But it’s silent.

No bird flits through leaves. No rustle in the brush. No buzzing, clicking, chirping, trilling. The trees sway, but the air holds still.

That’s not peace. That’s a ghost town.

A quiet world is a dying world.
Because nature hums when it’s healthy.

You may not notice that something is missing right away. But your body will. Your bones are tuned to Earth’s music, its low frequencies, its patterns, its rhythm.

And when that rhythm stops, so does something primal in us.

The Emotional Life of Vanishing Sound

Grief isn't always a scream. Sometimes it’s a mute button.

Extinction takes things we didn’t realize we loved until they were gone.

And sound is the most invisible of them all.

No fossil records preserve a song.
No museum can exhibit a frog's croak.
No statue can honor a sound that never came back.

We’re losing entire symphonies of life…songs that evolved over millions of years, sung once and never again.

What happens to a planet when it forgets how to sing?

3 Ways You Can Listenand Protect

Play extinct animal recordings.
Bring back voices that are gone. Platforms like Macaulay Library archive old bird calls and rare sounds. Let them live again in your home.
Support acoustic research.
Donate to groups studying soundscapes, like Cornell Lab of Ornithology or Ocean Conservation Research. They’re listening to what we’re losing.
Rewild your space.
Add native plants. Build a frog pond. Let wild birds return. Your backyard can be a song again.