Sounds of El Campo 
At night I lay in my tent, as still as the warm night air, my eyes lids heavy with the fullness of the day. The bright desert moon casts a blue shadow on everything save the dark trees, but in the monochrome night blooms to full color when I close my eyes and listen. A dog howls from the ravine below and another echoes with a low bark to the left of my tent. A trickle of water sounds on my right as it passes all the way from the natural river, up to the storage pool, through the a pipe to our camping area and then out a leak into a tiny pool. Crickets hold a constant bass line of chirping to which the other insects add their tunes: a slower high pitched chirping, a long strung out shrill of a tree bound insect, a yelp from what sounds like an amphibious baby goat. Leaves rustle under foot, paw, hoof and claw. The muffled talk in tents and intermittent snore are the only sounds I can assign a specific meaning, but tonight as I drift to sleep in El Rancho Refugio in Baja California Sur, I try to unwind hundreds of thousands of years of DNA that tells my ear to focus in on my own species and instead open my ears to the complete cascade of calling creatures.

The avian symphony rules the morning. Half a dozen doves coo lowly amoung the trees. A rooster flies down from a tree flapping its wings and lands on the ground to cry a morning call. Little birds sing out their cheerful notes: some sudden and high pitched, others low and gargling. A string of harmonica tunes from a camper greets the morning along with the birds. From across the campo a mother cow let out a long

Cali