A New Perspective: Listening is Learning

The soft “whit-whits” of a White-Whiskered Hermit just after sunrise. The languid stillness of an afternoon after 14 days without rain: perhaps if you can listen close enough you can hear the bromeliads wilting? The incessant calls of glassfrogs as a hidden sun slips beyond the horizon. The subtle “woos” of the Rufous Motmots closing out the daylight. Rain pelting the aluminum roof during the slim hours of the night. 

These are the sounds of the reserve after one month. Sometimes you can experience them in one day, or perhaps over a week. What you can’t forget is that even with the raucous neighbors (hungry hummingbirds), the still tranquility of the forest welcomes all those who visit.

Who are we to make such claims? You would think that as biologists who both just graduated with a Master in Tropical Biology through an Erasmus Mundus program, we, the new managers here at RLT, can make a claim or two about the natural world. However, the reserve has already taught us, after only one month, the importance of listening. 

My interests (Hailee) in plant phenology, agroecology, and education have taken me to mountain tops, digging through soil on farms, and into obscure parts of the world’s longest cave. The uniting factor of these experiences was the profound respect for nature I had developed as a child while traipsing through the local pond with my mom or going on a fishing expedition with my dad (it’s a surprise I’m not a herpetologist with the amount of frogs I caught as a child). 

Through Jonas’s story runs a similar vein, in which he was raised by biologist parents who explored the New England hardwood forests with him and whisked him away to Guatemala as a child on insect collecting expeditions. However entrenched in the forest he was as a child, he decided to explore coastal systems as an adult, working on topics from shark senses to the impact of cryptic mud-lobsters on mangrove ecosystems. 

Upon our return to a forest very unlike the ones we knew as children, it is no surprise that our diligence as learners has made us students of the cloud forest. Our first lesson that we wish to share with you: slow down and listen to the forest. You might just be in awe of the routine idiosyncrasies that the forest affords you.