Summer Dawn in Southern Rural Brazil

Waking up in a friendly tropical rainforest paradise, soaking fresh air from the nocturnal rain.
The anúraí have been singing since the late afternoon, only sometimes with voices partially drowned when the pouring got intense.

They were the ones that got my surprise and attention first, as I never heard anything similar to these vocalizations. Some people jokingly say the most predominant calls sound like little F1 race cars. In Brazil, tree frogs, are commonly called perereca, a word from the Tupi language, “moving in jumps”.

It’s also the time that the roosters start singing in the backyard, one of them with a very funny voice.

As sunlight slowly starts peaking through, soft birdsong arises from across, with a few calls from the Short-tailed nighthawk, with a single syllable, one note that rises in pitch very much like the melodic movement of a water drop.

The tree frogs never really cease to sing.

This sunrise soundscape is vastly different from all the others I have experienced, even in the same region, a few kilometres away. Despite being a rural area here, with dispersed houses, there are still vast expanses of forest, luckily without intensive agriculture, where the rivers are crystal clear and big cats like Pumas roam and howler monkeys orchestrate from the trees nearly every day.