Brazilian and now has a job at the National Institute of Amazonian
Research in Manaus. He is tall and narrow, with wispy gray hair and
mournful brown eyes. The kind of affection and enthusiasm Miles Silman
brings to tropical trees, Cohn-Haft saves for birds. At one point I asked
him how many Amazonian bird species he could identify by their calls,
and he gave me a quizzical look, as if he didn’t understand what I was
getting at. When I restated the question, the answer turned out to be all of
them. By the official count, there are something like thirteen hundred
species of birds in the Amazon, but Cohn-Haft thinks there are actually a
good many more, because people have relied too much on features like
size and plumage and not paid enough attention to sound. Birds that
might look more or less identical but produce different calls often turn
out, he told me, to be genetically distinct. At the time of our trip, Cohn-
Haft was getting ready to publish a paper identifying several new species
he had discovered through rigorous listening. One of these, a nocturnal
bird in the potoo family, has a sad, haunting call, which locals sometimes
attribute to the curupira, a figure from Brazilian folklore. The curupira has
a boyish face, copious hair, and backward-pointing feet. He preys on
poachers and anyone else who takes too much from the forest.
Because dawn is the best time to hear birds, Cohn-Haft and I set out
for Reserve 1202 in the dark, shortly after 4 AM. Our first stop, along the
way, was a metal tower built to support a weather station. From the top of
the tower, which was about 130 feet high and in an advanced state of rust,
there was a panoramic view over the forest canopy. Cohn-Haft had
brought along a powerful scope, which he set up on a tripod. He’d also
brought along an iPod and a miniature loudspeaker that fit in his pocket.
The iPod was loaded with recordings of hundreds of calls, and sometimes
when he heard a bird he couldn’t locate, he would play its song in the
hope that it would reveal itself.
“By the end of the day you could have heard a hundred and fifty
species of birds and only seen ten,” he told me. Occasionally, there was a
glint of color against the green, and in this way I managed to glimpse what
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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