His job as a wildlife film-maker has exposed Justin Anderson to exceptional scenes. In his book , he shares some, from polar bears trying to break into his hut in the Svalbard archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic to a noisy troop of red howler monkeys in Ecuador’s Tiputini Biodiversity Station.

Subtitled Nature’s hidden sounds and what they teach us about the wild, this book journeys deep into soundscapes to discover what we are missing by not tuning our ears to the right frequencies. We travel with Anderson as he studies how and why these extra-human noises are made, and the tech created to gain access to them.

As well as the songs of whales and birds, there are surprises, such as the emissions of insects, volcanoes and glaciers. We learn that Indigenous communities spoke of the sounds of the aurora borealis (pictured) long before scientists offered their verified recordings.

Anderson starts in the Indian Himalayas, looking for a snow leopard to film. Snow leopards don’t possess a vibrating layer of fatty elasticated tissue, thus making them the only big cats that can’t roar. That doesn’t make them silent predators; locals describe their yowling vocalisations on ridges as “singing”. But while the noise travels further this way and their songs help the snow leopards to find each other, we still aren’t sure what they are saying.

Anderson admits there are many wild sounds that remain mysteries. Where we can eavesdrop, we find that nature’s acoustics can be essential to survival, not just for escaping prey or seeking mates, but for the wider ecosystem. When water is scarce, for example, San people in the Kalahari region of South Africa use the croaking of African bullfrogs as a guide to find recent rainfall.

We find out about how microphones the size of a grain of rice are helping us hear the quietest voices, such as the dancing vibrations of the tiny red-faced male jumping spider of North America.

The decision to include QR codes in this book is smart: they take you to a recording of the creature you have just been learning about so you can, for example, hear elephants trumpeting at night as you read. Anderson’s recordings are complemented by those of other scientists, artists, film-makers and conservationists. I just wish the publisher had added some images to the website so we could see what we are hearing and reading about.

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