Natural sensory environments, despite strong potential for structuring systems, have been neglected in ecological theory. Here, we test the hypothesis that intense natural acoustic environments shape animal distributions and behavior by broadcasting whitewater river noise in montane riparian zones for two summers. We find that both birds and bats avoid areas with high sound levels, while birds avoid frequencies that overlap with birdsong, and bats avoid higher frequencies more generally. Behaviorally, intense sound levels decrease foraging in birds, whereas bats appear to switch hunting strategies from passive listening to aerial hawking as sound levels increase. Natural acoustic environments are an underappreciated niche axis, a conclusion that serves to escalate the urgency of mitigating human-created noise.

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