Hey everyone, happy winter solstice.

I'm Anne Strain Champs, and in today's episode of To the Best of our Knowledge, we're channeling the spirit of winter in the wild.

The wonder of frozen tundra, Arctic waterways, and polar ice fields.

So grab your snuggy and learn how to embrace the cold and ice.

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs, and it's midwinter. Those of us who live in the frozen half of the country are in full endurance mode. We're grimly

scraping ice off our windshields and rock salt off our boots.

People always say the best way to survive winter is to embrace it.

Well, some happy, cold tolerant few, actually seek it out. Thank you. So, Doug, what are we hearing here?

The sounds that you're hearing are recorded underwater, using a hydrophone or an underwater microphone in Bristol Bay in Alaska.

And what we're hearing are the gonging sounds and teeth

clacking from walruses. This is Douglas Quinn. He's an award-winning sound designer and composer,

and he's traveled to both poles just to record sounds like these. These are males generally

displaying, and the display has a visual component in the surface,

but they dive and they make these beautiful, resonant, full gonging sounds, and this wind-up

that you hear with the teeth clacking. They're not...

So that's teeth? I keep wondering, what is that tapping, banging sound? That's their teeth?

Yeah, their whole percussion ensemble.

But to me, it's sort of almost like gamelon in the range of sound that we hear.

And you can hear definite sort of percussive phrasing, particularly the teeth clacking, as they ramp up and reach a crescendo and stop.

A very, very, very powerful sound, and these are many, many walruses recorded near Round Island,

a walrus sanctuary off the coast of Alaska.

So how did you capture this sound? What did you have to do to record it?

...