Here, from Twisted Sifter, via reader Paul, is one of the rarest sounds you can hear in nature. It’s the sound of millions of migrating monarch butterflies flapping their wings, narrated by naturalist/biologist Phil Torres. Some day I will make it to this site and see the fantastic clusters of butterflies, like huge clumps of Spanish moss hanging from the trees.
Paul says it sounds like a waterfall, but you be the judge.
Amazing – thanks for posting it!
I don’t deserve the credit for saying it sounds like a waterfall. The narrator says this. I agree though.
I agree with both you and the narrator!
Erm, that isn’t the same creepy Phil Torres who kept setting up fake social media accounts to harass Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, is it? He’s chummy with ** ********, Dan Arel, Bell-End, and the other regressive NewRacists.
Oh dear. Well, at least if he’s narrating these types of videos, he’s not pulling off that kind of shit again.
It is weird. I thought I had seen his name on this site before. I did a search. The results were strange.
He wrote a hit piece criticizing Pinker for “Enlightenment Now”.
In 2016, he wrote a Time magazine article with Boghassian and Lindsay on “How to fight extremism with Atheism”. I did a search off this site to check this out and in 2017 he was attacking his former co-authors over the Conceptual Penis Paper Hoax.
It seemed like someone was flipping a coin and half of what he wrote was supportive of New Atheists and the other half were attacking. Though maybe the pattern is that everything after 2016 is attacking New Atheists. Not sure.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/?s=phil+torres&searchsubmit=Search+%C2%BB
You got the wrong Phil Torres pal. This one’s a naturalist, the other one studies existential risk.
Oh, I really should have caught that. I even remember having a thought that there were different Phil’s. And in retrospect, the thinking I was using to conflate them was pretty muddled. Just because I determined that it was the same guy in several of the search results, does not transitively mean it is the same guy in all of the results. I completely lost track of the Phil I started with.
Back in the late 60s I visited a place in Spain that was a butterfly haven. We came on a bus like hundreds of other tourists. It was a real tourist trap. There was a lot of clapping to startle the butterflies to get them to fly. I had no understanding of the effect on the butterflies but it seemed intrusive to me, like tapping on the glass of aquariums, or teasing dogs. It was rather wondrous to see so many gathered together like that.
“Aurally” stunning is the adverb I think Mr. Torres was looking for, and it is.
During WWII we in Michigan grew milkweed to make flotation devices. no plastic yet
We had monarchs and monarchs and monarchs.
I love monarch butterflies.
It is amusing to view the waving tree limb covered with butterflies like a superorganism.
Beautiful. Thank you so much. I have sent it to several others.
Good on the ears.
My hearing isn’t that good, I didn’t hear a thing. I think I would have to actually be there to hear it. 🙁
I didn’t hear it, either. Then I turned up the volume on my iPhone. Bingo! 😉