What is your favorite sound?
We don’t ask each other this enough. Favorite food, color, movie, sure, but sound? I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that. And my answer is easy: a gibbon call.
Video of the southern yellow-cheeked gibbon (vượn đen má vàng Nam)'s morning call in Cát Tiên National Park. Video via Ryan Campbell.
A series of resonant whoops accelerating to reverberating chirps, answered by staccato yips and howls fills Vietnam’s jungles at dawn. It sounds as if the gibbons have poured molten indigo into the forest’s every leafy gear and fusebox. The so-called “great call” of a yellow-cheeked gibbon and the enthusiastic duet response of her male life partner is simply one of the most astounding noises in the animal kingdom.
When the sun begins to peer through the mist hanging in the towering tung trees, the calls stampede above the forest. Each gibbon pair begins their day by announcing their territory with duets that serve to simultaneously strengthen their bonds. The songs plunge listeners into the realization that they are fully and completely in a complex and beautiful natural world that exists beyond the petty concerns of humanity.
A male (left) and female (right) southern white-cheeked gibbon. Photo via iNaturalistUK.
I gained a greater appreciation for the gibbon calls earlier this month during a trip to Cát Tiên National Park, when I could hear the songs in their natural environment, amidst the totality of the rich and interconnected rainforest ecosystem where endangered Bengal monitors stalk the leafy undergrowth, and rosewood trees rise in defiance of furniture manufacturers. If the forest could offer a single song to express its fragile vibrancy, it would be the gibbon’s morning call.
That recent trip wasn't when I first came to love the gibbon call, however. When I lived overlooking the Saigon Zoo, I heard the resident gibbons sing every morning. Particularly during the COVID-19 period, when the noises would shatter the aching silence of the city, they seemed to manifest loneliness and anxiety, much like how the great Chinese poets Li Bai and Du Fu used the calls to conjure isolation and melancholy.
My appreciation for the calls goes back decades before that, however. Before embarking on my university studies, I spent a summer taking a course in ethology at the University of Chicago. I was tasked with observing gibbons in the zoo for several hours a day, noting their every behavior, including their morning calls and separate calls of warning and alert. The exercise proved essential for teaching me that I didn’t want to embark down a path of science that dissected with painstaking record, keeping the intricacies of the natural world in clinically quantifiable terms. I preferred to let it wash over me in a deluge of unknowable, quasi-religious awe. It’s not much exaggeration to say I have the gibbon call to thank for inspiring me to become a writer and not a scientist.
I’m not unique, though, and I think we all could learn something from listening to the gibbon call, particularly when it essentially translates to “good morning - leave us alone in our corner of the forest.”
