Nautical Twilight in the Andean Jungle

Any recording from the jungle feels deep but it is a fast paced moment in this recording segment. It’s busy and intense but it’s still dark.

It’s February and we’re in the rainy season but even though it didn’t rain just here, one of the way that the high humidity translates into our senses is through the sound of droplets, crispy and constant, in a similar aural range perception of cracking autumn leaves; but here is an ever-green dense, dazzling and almost hostile rainforest, abounding in little critters, and many others not at all so little.

It was one of my first recordings here in the Manu Biostation and it’s nearly two recordings at once: one one side, mostly very dense vegetation, on the other an open space with a lake that operates its own nocturnal frog orchestra.

The screaming grey heron-like sound is actually the call of the wading Limpkin (Aramus guarauna). The jungle doesn’t sleep at night and here the limpkin takes the major role. Also very present – and what drove me to share this cut from the unattended night recording – is the Slaty-backed forest falcon (Micrastur mirandollei). I think of its timber as a mourning one, but the cadences are closer to laughter, pulling my attention in.

There is a mooing-like sound and I don’t yet know to whom it belongs to.

Apart from giving names to patterns of sound that might stand out more, this twilight is rife with sounds from insects, many frog calls distributed in the lake, the comforting but mysterious Tawny-bellied screech owl (Megascops watsonii) same-note sequence, the rubber-breathy and raspy vocalizations from the fascinating Hoatzins (Opisthocomus hoazin) and whatever else my perception, experience and knowledge can’t yet refine through.

When the recording ends, it’s 5:19am and so much more is yet to happen.