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 Locus Sonus servers for the 2026 Reveil 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 rode to as near as they could get to the wooded area. They arrived at the base of the track at around 4:15am and assessed the conditions. It was generally dark and very quiet at that time, 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, and as Thimphu is in a valley surrounded by mountains on either side, directly sunlight would not be seen until much later on, so the feeling of morning was going to postponed.

From where the road met the track, Carla and Karl walked up and along the path about 100m through a densely wooded area with various tsa-tsa shrines dotted along the 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 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 using Apogee converters, connected to an iPhone 17 Pro, and webcasting with the iziCast app), and sat on a rock overlooking the valley wearing the headphone/microphone array. This turned out to be much too noisy, mainly as mosquitos were continually landing 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 and setup her matched stereo pair of DPA 4060s and her new acquired Tascam FrAv 2 recorder. She placed the microphones on a large rock that was directly overlooking the valley below. There she both recorded the dawn chorus while listened to the live Reveil 24 stream coming from Resonance FM, so that the Resonance FM broadcast could be heard in some her recording, which was done deliberately.

Parts of the recording made using the Sennheiser AMBEO headset, connected to an iPhone 17 Pro, and webcasted with the iziCast app, can be found below in a 7 minute edit. In the first couple of minutes a Grey Nightjar can be heard clucking, and after this we think it’s a Bushchat of some sort singing. Then from five minutes onwards, there is a Blyth’s Leaf Warbler, and a Bushchat lands right next to the microphones and blurts out a brief vocalisation before flying off.

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, we passed through the densely tree covered part of the path. It was immediately noticeable how loud the birds were call out here, especially by the tsa-tsa shrine. Looking at the phone, the reception was patchy and the one bar came and went. Unfortunately we did not have much time to wonder around the surrounding area and investigate where would be the best place to record before, as we had only arrived the day before, and we had had other obligations with our group of pilgrims. In lieu of this, we both agreed that we would like to return to Bhutan together at some point in the future and do another Reveil, but arriving a week or so earlier to scout the surrounding forests and choose a better chosen location with a denser tree line.

A big thank you to everyone who helped organise Reveil 24+1 2026 this year: Grant Smith, Dawn Scarfe, Drew Mort, 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 with connecting the iziCast app to the Locustream servers. And last, but not least, to Carla Santana, who came out to Bhutan and back again, offering her unusual alacrity to the voyage.