However, at the same time, I could see the wild world was falling apart and I worried that the kind of work I was doing, though interesting, was not of much value for getting people to see the importance of conserving nature. In my first 10 years of research, all of my research was experimental work-as an undergraduate I studied the directional sensitivity of bats’ ears under Donald Griffin for my Ph.D., I showed that barn owls can locate a mouse in total darkness, based solely on hearing it move and for a postdoc, I studied how moths detect the approach of a bat, even though each moth ear contains just three sense cells. I always felt this was the best way to connect with people and get them to care about the natural world. I spent my life studying subjects that could be analyzed in direct and scientific ways, but which could also generate strong emotion. Your background is in the neurophysiology and behavior of small animals. I recently met up with Payne at his home near Woodstock, Vermont, to chat about his remarkable career, the state of the environment, and his current project to create “something that’s so intriguing to the world, it’ll have the same kind of impact that whale songs have had on people.” THE CONDUCTOR: In the 1970s, says Roger Payne, “I started playing humpback whale sounds to friends and other small audiences, and soon it became very clear that these sounds moved people deeply.” Some of those moved most deeply were singer Judy Collins, jazz saxophonist Paul Winter, and singer and songwriter Kate Bush, who blended Payne’s whale recordings into their music. He recently spoke at a meeting of the Interspecies Internet, where Ocean Alliance was awarded a $50,000 prize to digitize the hundreds of hours of whale songs that Payne, his students, and colleagues have collected over the years. Payne is now 86 years old, but no less invested in the plight of whales and other denizens of the seas. His chance encounter with whale song and the stunning subsequent success of the album led him to found the nonprofit Ocean Alliance in 1970, an organization devoted to scientific research and preservation of life in the world’s oceans. In the late 1960s, Payne was a senior scientist at the Institute for Research in Animal Behavior, studying animal echolocation. At the time, commercial whaling had decimated global whale populations, and Payne’s record helped spark the anti-whaling movement, the haunting songs of the humpbacks its unofficial anthem. It’s been more than 50 years since biologist Roger Payne brought whale song into the lives of millions via the popular album, Songs of the Humpback Whale.
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