Early one morning this past March, amid the rust-colored rocks and branching cacti of Arizona’s Organ Pipe National Monument, a man carrying two microphones approached a Scott’s Oriole calling from a thicket of blooming mesquite. As he crept forward, he noticed that the desert blossoms had attracted dozens of bees, whose buzzing threatened to drown out the oriole’s song. He contorted himself to circumvent the insects, but scrub brush blocked his every turn. Frustrated, he left the scene certain his recording was worthless. The man was Lang Elliot, a seasoned nature-recording artist, and when he listened to the tape later on he was surprised by what he heard: the melodic rising and falling whistle of the oriole, peppered with softer calls from other nearby birds and an undulating buzz of bees. It wasn't anything like the recordings he'd been making for decades, but that was the whole point of his stop at Organ Pipe—to experiment with new ways of capturing whole...