Since this post is mainly about sounds, I have put up a fairly random photo of one of the forest views here, looking across the São Laurenço valley from the main track approaching the farm. The lingering morning mist shows the line of the river. The big news to report is that I have finally managed to confirm the 200th bird species encountered at Sítio do Cervo and its immediate surroundings.
It was the outcome of an interesting exercise suggested by my friend and colleague Eduardo Duwe, a cameraman/film-maker in São Paulo. He is working with a project to monitor human impact on wildlife through sound, in some of the forest areas around the margins of the city. So as a test, we mounted a high-quality microphone on a tripod on the main trail through the forest here, connected it to my digital recorder, and let it run for just over 2 hours in the morning.
The result is a great record of the variety of species inhabiting the forest interior here, and I think I will repeat this every month or so in order to get a really good spread across the year. The sound file is too big to post on the site (comes to 125MB), but on a preliminary spin through, I came across a loud call I had not heard before. Sending the clip off to my fount of information Bruno, I found it is a White-eyed Foliage-gleaner (Automolus leucophthalmus). It seems to be a fairly common forest species, endemic to the Atlantic Forest, typical of the mixed-species flocks that roam the undergrowth feeding on ant-swarms. So in a sense it is surprising I had not located it before - but for me it wins the prize for being Species No. 200.
This was the scene confronting me two weeks ago as I tried to do my usual walk to the riverbank. There had been several days of incredibly torrential rain, and widespread flooding in the region. The whole of the low-lying area of forest beyond the hill which separates our living areas from the river was underwater for several days, and when I managed to return there a week or so ago it was covered by a layer of slimy mud.
As the summer draws to a close (the temperature has moderated now after a week of impossibly hot nights) some of the sounds are starting to change. For example, the more or less continuous singing of the Yellow-legged Tinamou (Crypturellus noctivagus), one of the characteristic species of the lowland forest here, has reduced to a more sporadic series of calls in the early evening. One curiosity is that the song has changed slightly from its usual haunting hoot to a more cracked piping. I can only speculate that this is the sound of juveniles from this latest nesting season "trying out" their call like an adolescent's voice breaking. Incidentally, even though we hear this elusive ground-dwelling species all the time through the spring and summer, we have yet to have a good view of it - one project we have in mind is to set up a hide and feeder in the middle of the forest to see if it will come out for us.
