Headline        Eavesdropping on Alaska
Subhead         Wild sounds are audio archivist Kathy Turco's life passion     
Run Date        1/26/2001      Day     Friday 
Page    F1     Section         Lifestyles     
Illustrator     Photos By Jim Lavrakas Anchorage Daily News    
Story Byline    By Sandi Gerjevic Anchorage Daily News 

      Think of yourself as a mouse in Kathy Turco's pocket. That's how she thinks of you when she's out there, somewhere in Alaska, three days from a shower, bird puke in her pack, shoulders burdened under 50 pounds of gear. A little silent mouse, listening. To wind. To caribou ankles clicking. To the lapping of a lake. TX: To the sounds a walrus makes: ''Ping-ping-ping. Gong. Gong.'' To a storm petrel: ''Eh-EH-eh-EH-eh-EH-eh-EH.'' To a river otter: ''Gruu-huff, gruu-huff.'' When Turco, a natural-sounds recording artist, goes into the Bush, she likes to think she's taking us along. She wants us to know what Alaska sounds like, when you really listen. Her challenge is to capture the sounds she wants while avoiding those she doesn't, like airplanes, traffic and the hum of civilization. As far as she's concerned, quiet -- as in the absence of manmade noise -- is one of Alaska's most precious natural resources. Turco works out of her home, a 20-by-24-foot cabin in the woods near Fairbanks. When it comes to her business, Alaska's Spirit Speaks, she has a boundary problem. Her work is her life. For Turco, winter means logging tape, writing, production, snow, cabin, home. Summer means floatplanes, boots, camp fires, mosquitoes. In a dozen years of eavesdropping on Alaska's natural world, she's created a digital stereo library of more than 350 hours of tape. Her list includes scores of mammals, marine mammals and birds. She's captured killer whales, bearded seals, caribou, musk oxen, picas, beavers, oyster catchers, jaegers and jumping salmon. Sounds in her ''other'' category include rain on a lake in Southeast Alaska, fire crackling in a snow pit in the Interior and wind in an old-growth forest. She's even captured the ambience of muskeg (summer, Southeast). ''I don't know anyone who takes the audio work to the level she takes it,'' said Dan Roby, a seabird ecologist at Oregon State University who has studied Alaska birds since 1974. ''Some of the things she records are so unique. I'm flabbergasted . . . I've never heard anything like it.'' People interested in Turco's recordings include filmmakers, biologists, educators, park officials and museum curators. And the bird puke? That's Turco's ticket into the wild. A trained marine biologist and graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she happens to be an expert at bird puke studies. The puke lady, they call her. Turco uses her skill to get work from biologists. ''I can put a science hat on very easily for fieldwork,'' she said. If Turco can't get hired to fly into the Bush, she hitches a ride where she can by offering herself as a volunteer. She's tagged along with moose hunters, bird counters, whale researchers. She's used her recordings like trading cards -- parting with a fall Aleutian eider, maybe, for a chance to record Interior boreal owls. She's well-traveled, logging parrots in Mexico, gannets in Newfoundland, guanacos in Chile and adelie penguins in Antarctica. Call her Kathy ''Turbo.'' Even she has trouble naming all the projects she's working on. ''I wish there were 10 of me,'' she said. ''I have lifetimes of work to do here.'' * There's the shark piece for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that will appear as an educational site on the Web. * There's the new visitors' center exhibit at Portage Glacier for which Turco has supplied more than 70 natural sounds. * She's on her way to a seabird science meeting in Hawaii, where she hopes to record albatrosses. * She's distributing a piece on global warming to radio stations around the country, for free. On her resume: * A designer used Turco's sounds in the movie ''Dinosaur.'' When morphed, a trumpeter swan makes a great pterodactyl, since no one actually knows what one sounded like. * Turco supplied 85 percent of the sound for an IMAX film called ''Alaska: Spirit of the Wild,'' which received an Academy Award nomination. * She wrote a play, ''The Gathering Place,'' and appeared in it at Out North Contemporary Art House last year. It featured sounds from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a place she said she'd ''go to jail for'' to prevent development. Buoyant and joyous, Turco talks endlessly about such projects. ''What's really fun with Kathy is her enthusiasm,'' said Bruce Wright, an administrator for the NOAA shark assessment project. ''She'll tell me about the things that she's working on, and it's just a blast. She just gets so all excited about all the neat things she's doing. The place she loves to be is out there, laying down in the mud with her microphone, collecting the sounds and experiencing everything that's around her.'' For her sounds, Turco gets between $1 and $5 per second, which seems high until you consider the overhead. Not to mention that it's a tenth of what documentarians pay for good visual footage, according to Turco. ''Sound always takes a back seat in production work,'' she said. ''But sound is hard to get. Trying to decide how much it's worth has been a nightmare. That's why I'm losing my shirt half the time. I never get what the sound is worth.'' Turco refuses to sell her work to advertisers. Her mission is education. She's a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, a medium that has allowed her to share Alaska's wilderness with millions of rush-hour commuters nationwide. She figured they, too, should know the eeriness of storm petrels massing in the midnight forest of St. Lazaria in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. They, too, should strain to discern the haunting chiming of Round Island walruses -- and perhaps understand why Natives imbue the animals with supernatural powers. Along with taking our ears to exotic places, Turco's task has been explaining the world of biology in a way her mother, Lovey, can understand. Once, when describing a project, she saw Lovey's eyes glaze over. ''I'm not educated,'' her mother said flatly. ''You use big words I don't understand.'' Since then, Turco has written her science pieces with Mom in mind. Turco, 40, grew up in Wakefield, R.I., a fishing town where she loved animals and knew a life of biology awaited. She enrolled in the University of Rhode Island at 16. Later, at the University of Montana, she cruised the science aisles of the library and thought: ''I have to learn all this.'' Yet after Turco came to Alaska in 1981, she discovered science wasn't an exact fit. She tried environmental consulting, but that wasn't quite right either. She discovered her true calling by accident. As a graduate student at UAF in 1985, Turco gathered samples of walrus flesh from hunters on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Sea. The island intrigued her, and the following year she returned on grant money to produce a slide documentary. As auklets flew overhead, she raised her cheap microphone into the air and caught their high-pitched chatter. A shift occurred. ''It moved me,'' she said. On the island, Turco had asked an elder, John Iyapana Sr., to talk about the walruses and his village. He did not immediately consent, and when he finally spoke on tape, she knew why. He'd been practicing what he would say, and he wanted his English to be clear. Not long after the interview, Iyapana developed throat cancer and lost his voice. Both Turco and the elder understood the implication. From then on, she thought of herself as a caretaker of the sounds she collected, especially of Native elders and animals. Another lesson she learned from Natives was to wait. In her work, the object is not to get closer and closer to the wild animal, but to become part of the scenery, she said. Otherwise, all you get on tape are alarm calls. ''You can't push animals,'' she said. ''They come to you. Turco calls it a rhythm she gets into out there that lets her be part of the environment. Her dead-on recordings of Caspian terns once helped Roby, the Oregon bird researcher, relocate nesting sites on the Columbia River. He called her accurate and reliable, someone who moves easily between biologists and Natives, two groups sometimes polarized. ''I think she's a remarkable individual,'' Roby said. ''There are very few people I know as devoted to their work as she is. And she does it with absolute integrity.'' Of course, there's a price. ''I'm a walking, living financial disaster,'' Turco said. ''I'm amazed I've survived this long. The only reason I can do it is because I'm single. There is no room for anything else. It takes everything I have to do it. Everything.'' On her worst days, when she feels busted, Turco likes to think about two fireproof boxes she keeps in her studio. That's her library, her life's work. She puts on one of her tapes and listens. ''I just know this is worth it,'' she said.  Daily News reporter Sandi Gerjevic can be reached at sgerjevic@adn.com.  TURCO SOUNDS, A PARTIAL LIST Killer whales Humpback whales Bottle-nosed dolphin Beluga whales Bearded seals Harbor seals Steller sea lions Fur seals Walruses River otters Sea otters Black bear cub Brown bear adults Caribou Elk Musk oxen Moose Wolf Wolverine Arctic fox Picas Hoary marmots Gray squirrels and red squirrels Little brown bats Beaver Bald eagles Peregrine falcon Goshawk Arctic tern Caspian tern Black-legged kittiwake Common murre colony Parakeet auklets Caspian auklets Pigeon guillemots Storm petrels Tufted puffins Oyster catchers Phalaropes Semi-palmated plover Western sandpiper Dunlin Surfbirds Yellowlegs Black tunstone Crows Gray jays Magpies Ravens Steller's jays Parasitic jaeger Black brant Canada geese Cranes Great blue heron Emperor geese Geese and ducks White-fronted geese Pacific loon Common loon Mosquitoes Salmon jumping in small cove and gulls feasting on spawners Salmon jumping upstream Old growth forest Muskeg Stream: in forest Streams: ice-laden Streams: rocky Underground caves Waves small slapping shoreline Waves big crashing shoreline Rain on lake Rain on vegetation Rain on sandy gravel Snowstorms Fire crackling Wind in alder bushes Wind in the grass Glacial ice Glacial ice and melt water Glacier booming        

Cutline         Audio specialist Kathy Turco of Fairbanks records sounds on the research vessel Montague as scientists capture sharks in Prince William Sound.  Turco has a space-efficient sound studio in her home outside of Fairbanks. The biologist-turned-naturalist specializes in nature-sound recording. Her sounds have been used in the Disney film ''Dinosaur'' and the 1998 Academy Award-nominated short-subject documentary ''Alaska: Spirit of the Wild.''  Audio specialist Kathy Turco entertains guests at her sound studio with ''guess this sound'' samples. Turco thinks of herself as the caretaker of the sounds she collects.