Watching wild animals can be exhilarating, educational and a richly rewarding experience. But spotting wildlife and keeping them in sight is often challenging. So wildlife researchers are increasingly turning to learning about animals through the sounds they produce. A new podcast series by Mongabay India titled “Wild Frequencies” explores this emerging science of bioacoustics in India.

Hosted by Mongabay India’s Kartik Chandramouli and Mongabay’s Shreya Dasgupta, the podcast series follows researchers who study wild animals in the forests, grasslands and cities of India. The episodes feature a wide range of animals, habitats and sound recording methods, from researchers using hand-held recorders to detect animals outside human hearing range, to scientists climbing trees in dense rainforests in the middle of the night to record tiny critters.

Listen to the trailer here.

Episode Overview

Episode 1: Find Them — This episode introduces listeners to the idea of bioacoustics, and how researchers in India use animal sounds to not just locate and identify species, but also count them. Animals featured: Birds, bats, dolphins, porpoises, wolves.

Episode 2: Know Them — This episode dives deep into how researchers decode what animals are saying, and what their sounds tell us about their behavior. Animals featured: Asian elephants, crickets.

Episode 3: Us and Them — This episode looks at how researchers rely on sounds to figure out how animals are adapting to changes in their environment caused by human activities. Animals featured: Many species of birds.

Banner image by Hitesh Sonar.