Juan Pablo Culasso has been blind since birth, yet he is one of the few birders capable of identifying almost 3,000 songs belonging to 700 different species. “Just because I can’t see the birds doesn’t mean I don’t know them. I observe them in a different way, through their voices.” He’s been working on recording and broadcasting the sounds of nature since he was a teenager. Juan Pablo depicts the sounds of birds in the Americas. His record collection consists of 12 albums that contain original recordings from the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, the Amazon jungle, western and southern Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, California and Minnesota (United States), and Argentina. “Interpreting birds’ sounds is just as important as seeing them. The experience is organized like a workshop/clinic.” Every day, at about 6 o’clock in the evening and in the morning, the volume of the selva misionera in Iguazú rises notably to produce a hypnotic din composed of layers of sounds, cries, metallic noises and electronic pulsations. Every day it takes up where it left off, each creature, which we can but sense in the complicated vegetation, in its place. Sight counts little here, ears are what you need.
“Let the eye be closed, let the sense of hearing be excited, and from the lightest breath to the wildest din, from the simplest sound to the highest harmony, from the most vehement and impassioned cry to the gentlest word of reason, still it is Nature that speaks and manifests her presence, her power, her pervading life and the vastness of her relations; so that a blind man to whom the visible is denied, can still comprehend an infinite vitality by means of another organ.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Theory of Colours)
What’s the secret of living here in the wild? The village chief of a community of Mbyá Guaraní, the Indians who descended the Paraguay River into Argentina, immediately understands what I’m getting at. The secret is to respect it. His wife Andresa shakes her head in full affirmation, almost as if she wanted to speak. We have to break off, the children are getting impatient, it’s getting late for the morning song: at around 9 o’clock every morning and every evening, the family lines up, in order, from the youngest to the oldest, to sing a song to thank the day to come and the one that’s just gone by, always in the forest. We’ve never said these things to the press, we never speak so openly: we don’t eat rare meat, you mustn’t eat an animal’s meat with its blood, that blood will start to flow through your veins and will transform you into something else. Like what? A tiger. One day a Guaraní woman fell in love with a truck driver, a white man. They got married and he made her try a rare steak. She liked it and she ate more and more. After a few months she fell ill and shortly afterwards she died. They didn’t know how to save her or how she’d got sick.
What’s the secret of living here in the wild? The village chief of a community of Mbyá Guaraní, the Indians who descended the Paraguay River into Argentina, immediately understands what I’m getting at. The secret is to respect it. His wife Andresa shakes her head in full affirmation, almost as if she wanted to speak. We have to break off, the children are getting impatient, it’s getting late for the morning song: at around 9 o’clock every morning and every evening, the family lines up, in order, from the youngest to the oldest, to sing a song to thank the day to come and the one that’s just gone by, always in the forest. We’ve never said these things to the press, we never speak so openly: we don’t eat rare meat, you mustn’t eat an animal’s meat with its blood, that blood will start to flow through your veins and will transform you into something else. Like what? A tiger. One day a Guaraní woman fell in love with a truck driver, a white man. They got married and he made her try a rare steak. She liked it and she ate more and more. After a few months she fell ill and shortly afterwards she died. They didn’t know how to save her or how she’d got sick.
