Owls hoot, frogs croak and hyenas laugh on "Wild Concerto," a groundbreaking collaboration between musician Stewart Copeland and naturalist Martyn Stewart. 

Stewart, a naturalist now based in Florida, spent decades criss-crossing the planet to make nearly 100,000 recordings of animals. Copeland, who is best known as a drummer for The Police, put it all to music, giving members of the animal kingdom a shot at stardom, with humans playing backup. 

They hope the album helps preserve the sounds of mother nature, while also increasing appreciation for the wild kingdom as more animals face extinction.

"If you show people the beauty of something and get them to fall in love with that, maybe we can tip something," Stewart said. 

The sounds of nature 

Stewart has focused on the sounds of the natural world for more than 60 years. As a child with a tape recorder, he ventured into the woods around his home and recorded the sounds of the Eurasian blackbird. 

What started as a boyhood lark became a career with a mission. 

"I always believe the reason I'm on this planet is to fight for the animals and the environment. And it's kind of my rent for being here," Stewart said. "I feel empowered to kind of give that message."

The message, he said, is that animal species are dying — and Stewart can tell by the change in the sounds around him. 

"Audio is the barometer of the planet," he said. "If you want to know the health of the stream or the river, the dipper will tell you. The frog will tell you the health of the marsh and the birds will tell you the health of the planet."

Stewart has the last known recording of the Panamanian golden frog, which was listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services as an endangered species in 1976. Today, the species is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as critically endangered.

Stewart's records also include the sounds of the northern white rhinoceros, now extinct in the wild. 

"If we keep stealing from nature then the inevitable is going to happen," he said. "We're going to lose a lot more."

Stewart, who is living with cancer, said his niece urged him to preserve his archive of nature recordings, which is how a naturalist ended up working with a rock legend.

The sounds of music 

Copeland is used to sharing the limelight with Sting, rather than with animals that can sting. He shot to global stardom in the 1970s as a member of The Police. The band broke up in the 1980s, but Copeland quickly found a new path as a composer. Filmmaker Francis Coppola is responsible for Copeland's pivot. 

"His thing is to find the talent and give them rope. And he got a drummer from a rock band and hired me to score his movies because his concept was that it's all about rhythm," Copeland said. 

The drummer said he knew nothing about film scores, but he knew rhythm. So he arranged barking dogs, clacking billiard balls and pile drivers in rhythmic loops, making music for what he called "found sound."

More movies followed. Then Copeland started writing classical music. 

His father, he said, raised him to be a jazz musician, but his mother instilled in him a love for classical music. 

"In one ear I got Jimi Hendrix. In the other ear I've got Igor Stravinsky," Copeland said. "They've always both kind of been there interacting in my brain."

Merging animal sounds with a concerto 

Now, in addition to the sounds of Hendrix and Stravinsky, Copeland also has the sound of hyenas in his ears. The hyena is Copeland's favorite. 

"They have a very wide vocabulary. They make loving sounds. They make aggressive sounds," he said. 

One of the tracks on "Wild Concerto" is "Hyena Party on the Skeleton Coast."

Copeland is not sure how he came up with a composition to enhance the sounds of hyenas. 

"I've asked the Lord above that question many times," Copeland said.

During the album's production at Abbey Road, Copeland waded through 30,000 hours of field recordings to decide which animals would get the star treatment. He said it was the raw sounds of the animals themselves that dictated the instruments he chose. 

"They're not actual notes, but you put an instrument with them and those animals become Pavarotti," he said.