This week two exciting things happened—call recording and a Sabahan wedding. Cha-ching! I love weddings—and Sabahan weddings are spectacular. But first, the call recording.
We made call recordings for a couple of reasons. One is that we wanted to start a library of call recordings for Kinabalu Park so that future researchers can utilize it as a reference and quickly learn which calls are which. For this we recorded all the species we could get (about 5) at the Miki Survival Camp (about 1000 m elevation).
A quick note about frog calls: they are incredibly varied and in my opinion, spectacular. Some are long trills, some sound like insects, some are loud honks, and others sound like someone is laughing at you. I started doing call recording a few years ago for my dissertation, and it was very different from other frog work I had previously done. Usually my work is about finding as many frogs as possible in a given amount of time, or over a given distance. With call recording, the work is much slower paced and requires a lot of patience. Some frogs will stop calling when you approach, so you have to find one that is calling, then turn off your headlamp and wait for them to start calling again. Sometimes they don’t start up again and you have to move on to another frog after 20 minutes or so. Sometimes they hop away while your headlamp is off, but you don’t know that until you turn your headlamp on again 10-20 minutes later. But when it all comes together, it’s really amazing to hear the call through a microphone—you pick up on so many more subtleties of the call than you do when you just listen normally. Then later when you analyze the calls (using special software) you actually get to SEE the differences in a spectrogram. It’s fantastic.
So we started working on the call library for Kinabalu Park, and we also recorded the call of Leptobrachella baluensis, because Paul (our Sabah Parks counterpart) thinks that this might actually be two species. This species is great because the mature males are only about 15 mm long (!!) and the call is sort of a funny ratchet-y sound. We only recorded about 5 individuals, and we haven’t yet analyzed them, but offhand we think there might be two different calls—which could mean two different species, or huge call variation within a species. Both of which will be interesting and exciting! My other secret reason for wanting to make call recordings is because I’m convinced I can use frog calls to make a cool house music mix, or piece the sounds together so they sound like actual words for a conservation-themed song. In my head, it totally works. =)
Speaking of awesome music, the other highlight of the week was the wedding we went to last night. The younger sister of my former neighbor Rusinin got married, so we were invited to join the festivities. I have been to 3 previous weddings here in Sabah, and I have loved every one of them. There is always dancing, with the Sumazao (the Dusun dance) playing a prominent role, usually there is karaoke (in Malay, Dusun, and English), a set of huge gongs are played, and there is a ton of delicious food. In many cases, a water buffalo (kerbau) is slaughtered for the wedding, and the elder women of the family will make giant wok after giant wok full of kerbau rendang. Rice is made en masse and served from coolers (which ironically work to keep it warm). And if it’s a non-Muslim wedding, local rice wine is passed around. Sabahans are hugely warm and friendly anyways, but at weddings they really shine and I have always been made to feel like a very special guest.
For many Sabahan weddings, there are multiple days of festivities. When I went to Justinah and Rusinin’s wedding many years ago, there was a ceremony at the mosque several days before the day of the wedding party. On the morning of the party, everyone gathers at the groom’s family’s house to eat, drink and socialize. From there, guests proceed in a caravan to the bride’s family’s house. The best part of the caravan is the truck that has the gongs—there are brass gongs in a series of sizes that get played the entire way to the bride’s house. Each gong gets played in a different rhythm, and there are multiple “songs” that can be played. At the bride’s house, the groom and his parents approach the bride and her parents, and when they meet they exchange greetings and blessings and the bride is united with the groom. Then everyone enters the bride’s family house for more food and drink and socializing. Later in the evening, the proper party gets going.
Last night we met up with Justinah and Rusinin in their kampung (village) and walked the few houses down to the wedding party together. The party was held in an open-air area attached to the bride’s parents’ house—a sort of extended patio had been erected from plastic tarpaulin and bamboo just for the wedding, a fantastic example of Sabahan innovation. After being introduced to the parents of the bride and groom, we were directed straight to the food—eggplant sambal, beef rendang, stir-fried veggies, a salad of pineapple, carrot slices, onions, and cucumbers…mmmm…no kerbau this time, but it was all delicious.
The evening progressed into a happy chaos of gong-playing, karaoke, dancing, and much interaction with the mob of kids. Everyone on our team took turns at the gongs;
Samantha, Anne, and I sang “Change the World” by Eric Clapton and “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” because those were the only English karaoke songs we knew; we all danced the Sumazao many times and we managed to rope nearly every kid in the village into dancing with us.
The kids were probably the highlight of the evening for everyone—they all started out really really shy, and afraid to talk to any of us. But we were able to slowly convince them to dance, which led to some minor conversation, and then later each member of our team was surrounded by about 10 kids each, exchanging funny faces, basic questions in mixed English and Malay, and periodic dancing and singing. I think one of the reasons I like weddings in Sabah is because they remind me of Sheridan weddings—lots of dancing, heaps of kids, and good times all around. I’m looking forward to my brother’s wedding in just 2 weeks! I think this was a good warm-up for me.
Tomorrow morning I leave for my summit camping trip, though I use the term “camping” loosely—we’ll be staying in a cabin, which is lucky, because it will get down close to freezing at night up there. I’m eager to see how high the frogs go, and to try to tease out some cryptic species identifications using frog calls. Stay tuned for the results!
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