On the first day of our trip, we casually walked around in a forest. It wasn't a deep forest and we didn't need a guide. I was really amazed by a beautiful birdsong that I'd never heard. Here's the sound I recorded:
As you can hear, it has a descending melody like a rolling glass ball. But we couldn't see the bird that made this sound at the time.
Later that night, I attended a tour, in which a guide took us to a mountain by jeep and told us about wildlife. It was called the Amami Rabbit Night Tour and the highlight of the tour was the Amami rabbit. They were interesting, too, but I was more excited when I saw a Ryukyu ruddy kingfisher. They don't make a sound at night, so the guide mimicked their sound to explain. He said, Khyo-roh-roh-roh-roh-roh-roh and we immediately recognized it was the sound we heard in the daytime. We couldn't see and hear them at once, but it was oddly exciting as if the mystery was revealed.
I had heard that Amami rabbits make a distinctive sound as well and looked forward to hearing it, but I couldn't recognize it. It was partly because they don't often make a sound, and partly because the jeep kept idling even when it wasn't moving. The jeep was moving very slowly and when we found animals it stopped, but the guide didn't stop the engine because if he stopped it, the animals would get surprised by a sudden change of sound and run away.
Long, long ago, Amami-Oshima was part of the continent and about 15 million years ago, it broke away and became an island. So, Amami rabbits have retained ancient rabbits' features. Their ears aren't very long and their legs are short. They can't run that fast. Other rabbits don't make a sound, so it's also characteristic of them. My coworkers were cooing over how cute the rabbits were. But I didn't feel they were cute. Their appearance was just intriguing and funny to me. They looked like a picture of rabbits drawn by a young child. Their bodies were round, with short legs and paws simply sticking out.
We also saw frogs, other birds, and a boar. I enjoyed the tour very much. It was raining, but Amami-Oshima is quite a rainy area in the first place and further more, June is the rainy season in Japan, so I have to say we were lucky enough that it wasn't raining heavily during the first two days. The Ryukyu ruddy kingfisher is migratory. They stay in Amami-Oshima during summer and they make sounds most frequently in this rainy season. I didn't know that but I was really happy to be able to hear their sounds.
I struggled a lot with whether to use the singular or plural form for animal names and the word sound.
I think you did a great job. Both the singular and plural are correct when referring to flora and fauna, but the singular tends to sound a bit "documentary" and formal, if you know what I mean. In every day speech, we tend to use the plural. As for the sounds, birds normally sing and have a song, while other animals make sounds. Great post!
title: The Ryukyu Ruddy Kingfisher and the Amami Rabbit