So the noise in the canyon is changing the way the birds behave. And that got Francis wondering whether that’s having an effect on plants the birds interact with. Take piñon pine trees and scrub jays, for example.

“We know that jays are really important seed dispersers for piñon pine,” he says.

The jays bury the seeds to snack on later, but inevitably, some get forgotten and grow into new pine trees.

Francis already knew there were fewer pine seedlings at noisy sites. Was that because the noise was keeping the jays away from their pine nuts?

Francis set up motion-trigger cameras at both noisy and quiet sites, put out some pine seeds, and waited.

As he predicted, jays avoided the noisy sites, not stashing any nuts there.

“We only found them removing seeds on the quiet sites,” he says.

That observation confirmed what Francis had expected: jays were only collecting and burying seeds at quiet sites.

Piñon pine trees like this one dominate Rattlesnake Canyon.

But that wasn’t the only thing the cameras saw. At the noisy sites, mice were gobbling up the seeds, leaving nothing behind to sprout.

So for the pine trees, it looked like the compressor noise was delivering a double whammy.

“We’re just not getting as many seeds going into the seed bank in noisy areas, and the ones that do might be consumed by the mice that are there.”