Émilie Rousset

PART 1

Interview with Faustine Bas-Defossez (director for Nature, Health and Environment at the European Environmental Bureau)

(Performed bilingual English-Slovene)

PART 2

Interview with ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ (farmer)

NATAŠA: Žiga, hi, we are here!

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Hi, Nataša, I see you, I am coming.

NATAŠA: Oh, what a cute green tractor!

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yes, yes, this one is ok, but I prefer the older one that I have at home, Eicher, my grandad bought it in 1968, but in this tractor, there is also a seat for you.

NATAŠA: Oh, nice that you are thinking of me! And when did you buy this one?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: My wife and I bought it last year, last August. We needed another tractor; the one bought by my grandpa is really high quality, but really old. So we bought this one with the money left from our wedding. We married last year.

NATAŠA: Congratulations! So it was a wedding gift?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: No. No. We were saving for the wedding and did not spend all the money, plus the money from the wedding guests. We had limited budget, so we had to buy this one, which is not the best. But our goal is to have an even better one in the future. We use it for plowing, for mowing, for everything, this is our main machine now.

NATAŠA: So this is after all a tractor of love maybe?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yes, yes. :)

NATAŠA: How much did it cost? Were you able to buy it in cash or did you take a bank loan?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: No, we didn’t borrow any money, we paid it in cash and it cost 10.000 €.

NATAŠA: Can I climb in?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yes, yes, come … Here is a space for you. You will have to squeeze a bit.

NATAŠA: Uuu, it’s hot!!! You know, I have never been on a tractor?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Really, never?

NATAŠA: Why do you prefer the old one, the one that grandpa bought?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: It’s smoother, and it is Germany quality, you can tell. We bought this one because it has 4-wheel drive and double strength.

NATAŠA: Does this “greeny” have a name?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yes, model Janez (Janez is a Slovene version of John), the company that produced it is Torpedo from Rijeka, that was the pride of Yugoslavia. The tires are also still original, made by company Record, also from Rijeka.

NATAŠA: So you don’t have the back windshield?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: There was one, but the first day when I was mowing, a rock crashed into it and broke it. Well, at least there is a bit of draught!

NATAŠA: Where do you have the radio? You could have a radio.

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: I don’t have it.

NATAŠA: So you don’t listen to music, when you work?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: No, I can’t because it is really loud when I work. But I like it because I can sing and no one can hear me.

NATAŠA: Aaah, you sing? Ok. And what do you sing?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Folk music or something from the musicals. I worked in a lot of musicals.

NATAŠA: So, could you sing something for our show? Anything? Say yes, say yes, say yes!

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yes!

NATAŠA: So, Žiga, you have a family farm; do you work with your whole family?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: No... My grand parents had a farm here until 2005, then my grandfather died. My parents did not want to take over the farm, they stopped, like – they didn’t want to do that. But I started again in 2017. In fact my sister, I think a bit out of teenage rebellion or wish to annoy the parents, bought me a cow for birthday and then we had one cow, and then we had two … and now we have 11.

NATAŠA: Which birthday was that?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: 17^th birthday, that was in 2017.

NATAŠA: Aaaah, so you are born in 2000! What was the cow’s name?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Her name was Pokljuka (this is a Slovene plateau), because she was born on the farm Pokljukar. The farm is in Naklo, so nothing to do with Pokljuka, but their surname was Pokljukar, so the cow was Pokljuka. We were very original, ha ha.

NATAŠA: When did Pokljuka die?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Two years ago, she broke a leg.

NATAŠA: Was this cow giving milk?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yeeesss? Because every cow gives milk.

NATAŠA: Yes, yes, ok … So where is this farm of yours?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Here, 5 minutes away, in the middle of apartment buildings.

NATAŠA: In the middle of apartment buildings? What do you mean, you have a farm in the city?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yes, we have a photo of my father from 1980, which is 40 years ago, and there are no signs of the city, there were approximately 4 houses and 4 farms, and that was that. And then came the apartment building complexes and urbanization and all. Our farm is approximately 600 years old.

NATAŠA: What is the size of the farm, how many hectares?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: We farm on between 7 and 10 hectares.

NATAŠA: What does it mean for you, what does it change in terms of farming, that you are in the middle of the city?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: A great plus is the market – we sell everything basically from our backyard. We don’t have to go to the farmer’s market or sell through cooperative …

NATAŠA: Which animals do you have and how many?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: At the moment we have 11 beef cattle – 3 cows, 4 bulls, 1 calf, just born today, 3 heifers. Heifer is a cow before she has a calf, before she becomes a mom, before she has milk. Before she calves. So, 4 pigs, let’s say 300 hens, a few more, a few less. And a dog. And a cat, yes. Eeeee … and a lot of flies.

NATAŠA: Do you sell eggs, milk? Is this how you finance yourself?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Eggs, milk, milk products and meat.

NATAŠA: Ok. Do you get subventions, from Slovenia and EU?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: So, we, both, for now, until we are still students, can live exclusively from the farm income; that is from selling the products and also from yearly farming subventions.

NATAŠA: Is this model of subventions working for you, can you survive with this yearly subvention from the EU?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Well, we have no problems, we can survive, but because we are able to sell everything at home. We are one of the few, less than 1 % of farms can function this way. The amount of money we get from the EU is – I think – 68 euro per hectare. You can get more if you are included in some ecological schemes, I don’t know, for example you do not cultivate the land for one year, you leave the field to the birds to nest, you do not mow and you can get some money. Until two years ago these subventions were tied to the amount of crops, namely, the more you produce, the more you get, now they are tied to the less you produce and the more you protect the environment.

NATAŠA: And how does the EU know that you left the field uncultivated or that you do not mow?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: EU controls it with satellites.

NATAŠA: Really??? EU surveils, what you do in your tractor, through satellites?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Maybe they hear me sing :)

NATAŠA: Maybe you could have the financial support for the artists, like us!

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: I hope, ha ha.

NATAŠA: So you and your wife, what are you studying?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Well, I study farming, agriculture at Biotechnical faculty. My wife is finishing the study of midwifery.

NATAŠA: Ok, do you like doing all this, do you have plans to continue with farming?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: Yes. We would like to continue, we would like to expand … expand the farming land we cultivate and the number of animals, we want to expand the production of milk and of cottage cheese, yoghurts and similar.

NATAŠA: What is your thinking, are you going more in the direction of ecology or are you interested in more intensive farming?

ŽIGA ŠTRUKELJ: In fact, something in between. Not really ecological since we have serious legislation problems. Ecology legislation in Slovenia has a bunch of pointless regulations that control really unnecessary things, not nature conservation. This is not because of the EU legislation, but because of our legislation that is harsher than any other in EU. Trying to be holier than the Pope. But I am also not interested in the intensive farming, where you work in a “factory” way, where there is no connection to farming. In fact our model is a sort of village romantic way; 30, 40 years old model, where you still work the “old way”: every day I mow fresh grass for the cows, not a lot is automated, still a lot of manual labor. We can work this way because we have a nice income from selling from home. This kind of farming does not have a name, it is something in between. Yes, this is how it goes.

PART 3

Interview with Fanny Ribak (bioacoustician)

Drosophila fly recording

FANNY: That’s the fly.

EMILIE: The what?

FANNY: The drosophila fly. I did my thesis on the drosophila actually – on the sound signals of the drosophila. Do you know what a drosophila is?

EMILIE: No.

FANNY: You often see them around ripe fruit.

EMILIE: Oh right, yeah.

FANNY: Overripe fruit in kitchen fruit baskets. They love overripe bananas actually. They eat the yeasts that develop on overripe fruit.

EMILIE: What do you hear in this extract?

FANNY: So, if you pay attention, there are at least four different types of signals. First you hear “oooouuuuuuouuuuu”: that’s the sinusoidal song, which is at a frequency of about 155-160 hertz. Then you hear “frrrrrrrt” – something like that – that’s the pulse song. Both are produced by the male. And sometimes you hear “vvvvt!”, like that: that’s the female. And at the end you hear something quite different: “ouurruuouuggg”, like that. And what’s happening here, is that these are actually the songs produced during mating.

EMILIE: So we just heard flies mating.

FANNY: Yep, we did.

EMILIE: Can you tell me about your profession, your practice?

FANNY: Of course. I’m a teacher-researcher in ethology. And my research activity is bioacoustics. That means I study sound-based communication in animals, to understand what animals are saying to each other when they’re exchanging sounds, and how they’re saying it – meaning I research systems of information coding and decoding: what is the nature of that information, and how is this information decoded by the recipient individuals?

EMILIE: And what exactly is ethology?

FANNY: Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour.

EMILIE: And do you also lead outdoor research into other species?

FANNY: Yeah so I worked on the drosophila during my thesis – my thesis was a while ago – and after my thesis I started working on birds, and birdsong, and songbirds in particular. So that’s part of the models that I study in the field. To take common birds, um… I worked on skylark song, and also robin song.

EMILIE: So how does that work? Where did you go? How did you… what are the protocols?

FANNY: Skylark song is extremely diversified; it’s made up of tons of sound units. And since we already knew how the skylark was saying “I am a skylark”, we were looking for other types of information. Analysing the songs helped us to realise that between the birds of a same locality, who were neighbours – all these neighbours were producing syllables in their songs that were the same, and they were producing them in a certain order. And then if we recorded birds from another locality, locality B, they also shared syllable sequences – sound units in a certain order – but which were different from those of locality A.

EMILIE: You mean that a group of skylarks from a certain field and a group of skylarks from another field don’t speak exactly the same language?

FANNY: Exactly. They don’t speak the same – well, actually they do – they speak skylark. But that’s precisely the definition of a dialect. Meaning there is a dialect – which we define as micro-geographic, because it’s really only a few kilometres away, right, it’s not very far.

EMILIE: Are there any translator skylarks, who move from one to the other?

FANNY: Not to my knowledge, no.

Emilie: Can we hear some skylarks?

Fanny: So... Skylark... There. Here we go, a little extract of skylark song.

Skylark song recording.

Emilie: Can you tell us what you’re hearing?

FANNY: So, whatever I’m hearing, you have to know that I’m seeing it too. Because I’m watching an oscillogram and a spectrogram of this song at the same time. So what I’m seeing and hearing is that the sound units that are being produced are very diverse. You see, each individual skylark produces on average 300 to 350 different syllables. In its repertoire, the number of different sound elements that are being produced is 350. This is huge when you compare it to another pretty common bird –

not from the same area, this one is a forest dweller – the common chiffchaff’s repertoire is between 2 and 5.

EMILIE: Oh, right.

FANNY: So skylark song really has a lot. It’s super diverse. We hear… it sounds like “goulouloulouou”. It sounds like it’s never the same. But when we look at it on the oscillogram, we see there are things that repeat and that we can analyse, that we can quantify. Which is what was done: 350 different syllables. I’m not sure I can identify them with my ear. But what we demonstrated is that the birds are able to identify them.

EMILIE: Do you call it a language?

FANNY: Yes, you can call it a language, I don’t find that shocking at all.

And to add to that, there’s something I wanted to say actually, because if you’re interested in landscape, well landscapes are full of noises created by humans, which have an impact on the lives of animals, and on the exchanges between animals through acoustic signals, and that’s been demonstrated for all kinds of species. It impacts the sound signals of birds: the birds change their sound signals to overcome the noise, either they modify the frequency of their song, or they shout, actually, they sing louder.

And it’s been demonstrated in insects too, and in aquatic environments, in marine mammals, who are terribly affected by our noise.

There are also animals who produce sounds in freshwater aquatic environments: little insects which spend all or part of their life cycle in freshwater and that produce sounds. And it’s been demonstrated (that was another thesis that I supervised) that these insects – like little aquatic stinkbugs that produce stridulations, “kss-kss”, like that – are affected by noises in the water of anthropic origin. For example, in the experiment we conducted, the bugs would delay producing their own signals, because of noise.

EMILIE : “Anthropic” means produced by humans?

FANNY: Yeah, of anthropic origin, for which humans are responsible.

And that’s one example among others. Some noises become potential masks, because they’re on the same frequency. And this was a very basic occurrence: it was the noise of a pump, which was installed to pump water from a very pretty pond to water a golf course nearby. And although the pump was gone, the motor was left, and it would go off regularly. And you can record that: you put a hydrophone in the water, and when there’s no noise you can hear the insect stridulations, and when there’s noise, you can hear the noise very very clearly. So our noises are everywhere actually.

EMILIE: And maybe one last question, what does “listening” mean for you?

FANNY: It’s a lot of things… It reinforces… the way in which I pay attention. Why listen? Listen to try to understand what they’re saying to each other, how they’re saying it. Meaning trying to enter into their world. I want to come back to that thing about paying attention because actually understanding what they’re saying to each other, how they’re saying it, that allows me to heighten my attention, to heighten my consideration towards all these universes. Because I know how it works. And a simple thing, before knowing how it works, I know who is there.

Voices disappear in the distance

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