From 5am London time on Saturday the 2nd of May to 6am on Sunday the 3rd of May 2026, the Reveil 24+1 2026 broadcast made a full loop of the earth during Dawn Chorus Day weekend. For this event, our recording engineer Karl found himself in the capital of Bhutan, Thimphu, while on a Buddhist pilgrimage and, as a result, set up an early morning webcast stream from a nearby hill side only a 30 minute walk from the city’s centre.

Considering a need to travel light during a pilgrimage in Bhutan, a minimal webcast setup was chosen. To keep the quality of the audio stream as good as possible, and to ensure a stereo audio feed was webcast through the 4G network of Bhutan, it was decided that webcasting from an iPhone would probably be best. Thus a Sennheiser AMBEO headset with Apogee converters was connected to an iPhone 17 Pro and the iziCast app was used to stream the audio to the Locusonus servers for the 2026 Reveil 24+1 event.

On the morning of the 3rd of May, Karl Richard and Carla Santana set off from their hotel and began walking up the western Thimphu valley side at around 3:45am to a woodland area just outside of the Bhutanese capital. On the way there they hailed a taxi that passed by, and drove as near as they could get to the chosen location. They arrived at the base of the track at around 4:15am and assessed the conditions. It was generally dark and very quiet, but mild and dry with little if any wind. Civil twilight did not commence until about 04:53am, with sunrise set for near on 5:30am, so there was time to walk to the location and set up. However, as Thimphu is in a valley surrounded by mountains on either side, direct sunlight would not be seen until much later on, so the feeling of morning was going to be postponed. Thus one needed to be aware that twilight might not be as obviously noticeable here, so keeping an eye on the clock was important.

From where the road met the track, Carla and Karl walked up and along the path about 100m through a densely wooded area that had a couple of tsa-tsa shrines along its way, until they came to a place where the tree line thinned, but the foliage on both the upper and lower slopes was thick and healthy, and the dense tree line was not too far behind them. Looking around, one could see most of Thimphu below. Checking the 4G signal there, it seemed to have a steady two bars of reception on each of their phones. Initially Karl set up his microphone array (a Sennheiser AMBEO headset, webcasting through the iziCast app running on an iPhone), and sat on a rock overlooking the valley wearing the headphone/microphone array. Wearing the headset turned out to be much too noisy, mainly as mosquitos continually landed on exposed parts of Karl’s body and, as such, he had to move a fair bit not to get bitten. After 5 minutes of this, he removed the headphone/microphone array and placed the Sennheiser AMBEO headset around a nearby tree trunk and connected the iziCast app to the Locusonus servers. It seemed to produce a good spacial signal and, as Grant had requested that we leave the stream open for as long as possible, it was left webcasting for an hour and a half.

Carla walked on further down the track to setup her matched stereo pair of DPA 4060s and her recently acquired compact Tascam FrAv 2 recorder. She placed the microphones on a large rock that was directly overlooking the valley below. From there she recorded the dawn chorus while listened to the live Reveil 24 stream coming through the 4G network via Resonance FM, so that the Resonance FM broadcast could be heard in some her dawn chorus recording, which she did deliberately to experiment with how it might sound, especially given the global relay delay.

Parts of the recording (made with the Sennheiser AMBEO headset, connected to an iPhone 17 Pro, and webcast with the iziCast app), can be found below in a ~10 minute edit. In the first couple of minutes it sounds like a pair (or trio) of Grey Nightjars clucking off to one another. After this it’s probably a Bushchat of some sort singing. Then from about five minutes onwards, a Blyth’s Leaf Warbler clearly calls out and, at about seven minutes onwards, a Bushchat lands right next to the microphones, blurts out a brief (and very loud) call, before fluttering off; the sound of the wings beating up close to the microphones is a real treat.

The actual Reveil 24+1 2026 webpage for Karl’s and Carla’s webcast can be found here.

After packing up and heading back to the hotel on foot, Carla and Karl passed back through the densely tree covered part of the path. It was immediately noticeable how loud the birds were calling out there, especially by the tsa-tsa shrine. Looking at the phone, the reception was patchy and the one bar came and went, so – despite the high density of the bird calls in this area – it would not have been suitable for a webcast. Unfortunately there was not much time prior to the webcast to survey the surrounding area and investigate where would be best to stream from, as Carla and Karl only arrived the day before and had other obligations with the group of pilgrims they were travelling with. In lieu of this, both Carla and Karl agreed that they would like to return to Bhutan at some point in the future to do another Reveil together, though arriving a week or so earlier to scout the surrounding forests and choose a better location with a denser tree line.

Reveil 24+1 is done once every year at the same time i.e. on International Dawn Chorus day. If you’re interested about how to join in, please click here and read through the Reveil 24+1 website on what you need to do to participate.

A big thank you to everyone who helped organise Reveil 24+1 2026 this year: Grant Smith, Dawn Scarfe, Mort Drew, Christine Bramwell, Ciara Drew, Maria Papadomanolaki, Stephan Cousot, Gregoire Lauvin, and anyone else behind the scenes that we didn’t mention… Plus a very big thank you to Daniel Nöthen who made the iziCast app: his expertise and openly approachable way of being helped us iron out some issues that we were having while initially connecting the iziCast app to the Locusonus servers. And last, but not least, to Carla Santana, who came out to Bhutan and back again, offering up her knowledge of recording tech and artistic practices, along with her Portuguese sense of humour.

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18/07/2026 UPDATE

Mort Drew, a sound artist and creative technician working on flat listening and collective adcasting through experimental ecological radio practices, was recently asked by Framework Radio to produce a Reveil Sampler for broadcast. Due the sheer diversity and unique sounds from all the 250+ live streams aired on Reveil 24+1 2026, after some deliberation the extracts for the sampler list were narrowed down to seven different webcasts:

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Stave Hill Ecological Park, Rotherhithe
London Soundcamp, Stave Hill / TCV
https://streams.soundtent.org/2026/streams/utc1_-1a7b00f1-28ce-4ee4-a5c4-927f6d748da9

Soajo, Gerês-Xures Biosphere Reserve, Portugal,
Cláudia Martinho,
https://streams.soundtent.org/2026/streams/utc1_-da801bb9-580c-4487-bcb9-deedb6c4769f

Disko Bay, Greenland,
Disko live!
https://diskolive.com/about-disko-live

Tewa Land ~ Jaconita, New Mexico
Adrienne Sloan
https://streams.soundtent.org/2026/streams/utc-6_-060f2c38-cad1-4fb4-9a70-6f0288bcbc5

Thimphu, Bhutan
Karl Richard & Carla Santana
https://streams.soundtent.org/2026/streams/utc6_-52c7f835-aa3e-4a25-98f9-df934b01b8d2

Sakala Forest Recreation Area, Järva County Estonia
John Grzinich, EKA New Media
https://streams.soundtent.org/2026/streams/utc3_-909bfbf0lo-35b6-42b9-8c84-9ec582030c8b

Kozmic meadows
Udo Noll, Magdaléna Manderlová, Michal Kindernay
https://streams.soundtent.org/2026/streams/utc2_-382bb3af-34cd-45e4-9a7c-0fb2fe34f230

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We are very happy to hear the live feed from Bhutan was included in the sampler, which can be heard below, via Mixcloud. Thanks Mort.