Dawn Chorus

Songs for a new day

            One of the pleasures of a Florida spring and summer is to hear the dawn chorus that greets the rising day as I go out to collect the newspaper.  As pleasing to the ear as this dawn chorus is, it is to the dawn chorus in the rain forests of Borneo as a string trio is to a full orchestra.  Of course, the price of the ticket to hear this orchestra is $2500 and 32 hours by air, followed by 8 hours by bus and another 2 hours by 4-wheel vehicle for a total travel time of over 40 hours.  It might take a day or two of recovery before you are able to rise well before dawn, for to enjoy the full dawn chorus effect, you have to be 100 feet up in the trees well before dawn.

The rain forest of Borneo at dawn, viewed from 100 feet up a tree.

            So, at 5 a.m., you don your headlamp and make your way along the misty trail to the canopy walkway. The ladders up to the walkway are slippery from the wet night, and double as highways for ants.  You make your way on swaying suspension bridges of wooden planks hanging from steel cables running from one gigantic dipterocarp tree to another, finally settling to wait on a bench on a platform 100 feet up in one of the trees. Under the dense forest canopy, neither the trees nor the ground below is visible when you turn your headlamp off.  Sometime around 6 a.m. a dim dim grayness arises, and the first voices of the chorus begin--- gibbons hoot their sequences of hoots, the hoots accelerating until they almost seem to fuse before going silent again.  First, a distant group toward your left, then a much closer group behind you and one in the middle distance in front, alternating their hooting as though under the command of a conductor. Very soon the first birds begin, each with a different note or song, some high, pure and complex, some metallic and simple and some low and full, each a different rhythm, more and more until the air is filled with layer upon layer of complex music.  You cannot but sit in wonder.  As the light rises, indistinct silhouettes of trees appear in the mist, and the first daytime insects, perhaps cicadas chime in, pulsing loud and regular, the rhythm section.  The music envelopes you, you are washed with sound until it is fully light.  Then the gibbon hooting drops out, the birds, one by one, fall silent and finally only the insects continue their rhythms. The dawn chorus is over.

            It is full daylight when I return to the station. At the foot of the river bridge is a thicket of ginger, its enormously tall leaves overhanging the on-ramp.  Arrayed among the stems are the biggest ginger flowers I have ever seen, the size of a child's head, with row after row of flower buds ready to form the next circling wreath, each scarlet, yellow-lipped flower cradled in a spreading pink bract.  Each head stands on a stem almost as tall as I am, and I debate whether to cut one off to draw it later.  But it seems a shame to cut so spectacular a flower, and more to the point, I have nothing to cut it with.  I ponder my ethical choices over the next couple of days, but then I finally give in and bring a knife to harvest the flower to prop it on my porch so I can draw it at leisure, later returning to the thicket so I can add a drawing of a stem and leaves behind the flower.  I enjoyed the dawn chorus three more times during my stay, and each time, on my way back, a silent pause in front of the ginger grove added a final note to the dawn chorus.

The very large ginger, Etlingera eliator. Drawing by WRT.