Storm petrels - Shetland

This was my first ever trip to Shetland and I have two small children, so it was a big ask to head off and leave my wife for a week. After much negotiation she agreed I could go so long as the trip would serve as my 40th birthday present. We also persuaded her parents to come and help out while I was away which was a real bonus!

My main goal for the trip was to try a get a good recording of storm petrels. I have heard them before on a wet and windy night on Skokholm Island in Wales but hadn't managed to get a decent recording. I also got the chance to watch them through some night vision goggles on Skokholm. In flight they look almost like bats - quickly fluttering then gliding in short bursts and avoiding obstacles in the pitch black with amazing skill. I was really looking forward to seeing them again and hopefully getting some decent recordings - I am trying get a collection of recordings to make a sea bird SFX library in the near future and decent storm petrel recordings would get me one step closer to finishing the library.  

View from the Levenwick Community Hall campsite

I travelled from my home in Edinburgh up to Aberdeen and then took the overnight Northlink ferry from Aberdeen to Lerwick. I stayed in a sleep pod on the ferry which is basically a large comfy, reclining chair, and actually managed to get a decent sleep, arriving in Lerwick at around 7am. Then from Lerwick I travelled 20 minutes south to the Levenwick Community Hall and Campsite (shown right). This is a lovely wee campsite with toilets, showers and a small kitchen with electricity. Having access to electricity was very handy as it allowed me to re-charge batteries between trips .

Coloured buoys on a wall on Mousa

My final destination was the Mousa broch  (shown above). The broch is a 10 minute ferry journey from Sandsayre pier and is an absolutely amazing structure. Brochs are circular, iron-age buildings made from stone and can be found all round Scotland. The Mousa broch is the best preserved example of its kind and is thought to be around 2,300 years old. It is even mentioned in some for the viking sagas. You can get to Mousa on a ferry which runs daily at 11.30am from Sandsayre pier. The boat trips are run by Rodney and Darron Smith who also run night time storm petrel trips. On these trips you can go over to the broch at night and watch the storm petrels arriving back at their nests. Rodney and Darron are very knowledgeable about the island's history and its wildlife and are happy to answer any questions you have on the trip over. Rodney also told an amazing story about a shipwreck that happened nearby. There is an article about it on the Mousa boat facebook page that's worth a read.. or you can book a trip yourself and hear the story from Rodney himself. I took a few trips and left my mics overnight and then did a storm petrel night trip and stayed a night on the Island.  Mousa is an Rspb reserve and May is breeding season for a lot of the birds that live there so I made sure to ask permission from the reserve manager.

I collected my mics after their first night setup around the broch and to my horror noticed that they had been knocked over and the dry bags had been moved around. Upon listening back to the recordings I discovered the culprits - not happy with just ruining my recordings by baaing repeatedly, sheep had knocked over my mics and even managed to disconnect the mics from my D100!

I had the most success with my recordings when I went over to the island at night and listened until I identified where the birds were calling from and then carefully setup my mics. They start to sing as it gets dark and often sing for up to 30 mins or so. This gave me a chance to find a singing bird, carefully setup mics, set levels and then hit record and back off a bit. Often I will leave ‘drop rigs’ for long periods in a location I think things will happen but this turned out to not be the best approach for this situation given the limited time I had to get good recordings and the impossibility of guessing exactly where the birds would sing from.

In Finnish storm petrels are called ‘ulappakeiju’ which translates directly as 'fairy of the open sea'. The sound they make is really amazing but has been described by some as sounding like a 'fairy being sick'. It's a funny image but I think they actually sound really beautiful - more of ‘a fairy singing’ to my ears. But definitely a mischievous sounding and magical fairy - possibly the type of fairy that might carry off a child and leave a changeling substitute in its place or something of that sort.

Trusty Sony D100 and Clippy 172s

My Sennheiser DMS rig

A shag sunning itself on the rocks

I took a range of mics and recorders with me because I wanted to make the most of my trips so I brought my mkh8040 and mkh30 DMS rig (shown above), my trusty Sony D100 and a pair of Usi pro mics which I plugged into my Sound Devices MixPre 6ii. All performed really well and survived a few rain storms. If rain was forecast, I did my best to setup the mics inside the broch, rather than outside facing the walls, to give them some protection from both wind and rain but even when the rigs got a small shower the mics continued working and the dry bags did their job protecting the recorders.

The difference in sound between outside and inside the broch was really notable. The 4m thick stone walls meant that once inside you could hardly hear the sea - even when the wind was blowing with quite some force. This was especially true inside the various chambers and I got some nice ambience recordings from inside the broch as the storm petrels first started to arrive.

It took a good few attempts but finally I managed to get some really close up recordings I was happy with and I left Shetland slightly bleary eyed and tired but feeling very happy with how the trip had gone. A couple of the recordings are below. If you want to keep up to date with my blog posts please hit the subscribe button at the bottom of this website.

the sound space · BIRDSea Storm Petrel Individual Calling From Rocks On Mousa Broch PS NONE SonyD100

the sound space · BIRDSea Storm Petrels Calling From Rocks On Mousa Broch PS NONE SonyD100

..More lichen. I got a bit obsessed

Sea pink or sea thrift

Finland Trip

At the start of this year I had the brilliant opportunity to head out to Finland with the writer Patrick Laurie and conservationist David Jarrett. David has been doing a really interesting project out there using AudioMoths to monitor curlew breeding productivity. AudioMoths have been around for a while now and are made by a company called Open Acoustic Devices. They are tiny low, cost audio recording devices and can be used as ‘full spectrum acoustic loggers’. They are often used for ecological research as they can record for very long periods of time and are very power efficient.

David sets up the AudioMoths in curlew breeding grounds and an automatic classifier is used to analyse the recordings looking for particular calls and the patterns of these calls will tell him whether the curlews are breeding successfully at a site or not. Here is an interview with David on the ‘Working for Waders’ website where he goes into detail about how he uses AudioMoths. 

This trip to Finland was funded by the RiGG Trusts ‘Curlew Connections’ program and the central plan was to record some podcast episodes for ‘The Curlew Tapes’ with David and Patrick discussing wader conservation in Finland and its relationship to waders in Scotland. I would then setup high quality drop rigs in a few of the locations to try and get good recordings of some of the wader species there both to use as material for the podcasts but also for my own work. The trip would act as a chance to find out more about David’s use of AudioMoths and would also be a good scouting trip for future recording trips to the area.

I have done small amounts of work with Patrick Laurie before but this trip would be a great chance to work with him on a longer project. Patrick wrote the book ‘Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape’ and I highly recommend it. I’m slightly biased - as its about the place I grew up and offers insights into a lot of the issues I have a real interest in, but its a very well written and deeply personal book I think anyone with even a slight interest in wildlife and conservation will really enjoy. 

Me and Patrick arrived in Helsinki, picked up the rental car and headed up to meet David, who had already been staying near Joensuu for a few months working on his project and scouting out possible location to put audio moths. We were staying at a cabin near IIomantsii, which is a few miles for Joensuu close to the Russian border, and David had already got a good sense of the area around and the species present (which was amazingly helpful when it came to figuring where I might setup my microphones). As well as being a brilliant tool for research projects like David’s, AudioMoths can be very useful for scouting out locations for putting larger recording rigs as they require very little power and can generate large amounts of data on a particular area. 

Below is the view from the cabin -

The first thing we did when we arrived was head into the forest with David to look at some of the sites he was studying. These locations are vast, pristine, raised bogs surrounded by forest and are home to an amazing quantity of species. We arrived in the evening and I very quickly noticed the sound of black grouse lekking all around and whimbrel and curlew overhead. I could also hear black tailed godwit, golden plover, green shank, green sandpiper and many more. There were a pair of Ospreys around and black kite which I've never seen before. I was very glad I had brought my wellies as the hot weather meant that large areas of the bogs were completely covered in water from snow melt and if you stayed still for any length of time you started to sink. This made setting up mics a bit of a challenge. Below is picture of one of the bog sites showing the level of the water. Often when I returned to pick up the mics the water level would have risen by a foot or so!

They are genuinely mind blowing places and the sheer variety and density of wildlife in them was really amazing. Below is one of the podcast episodes I recorded at one of these locations in which David and Patrick are discussing curlew migration and some of the other species that live in these locations. 

THE CURLEW TAPES - EPISODE 10

During the trip I setup mics all around the bog locations and out on the bogs themselves and left them running overnight. Usually this was pairs of Clippy Em172s or LOM Usi Pros in ‘tree ears’ configuration. The location lends itself well to this setup as there were small trees on all the bogs which were perfect for attaching mics either side of. Its was also very quick to setup so I could set the mics up and get out the location quickly to avoid too disturbance and having the mics and recorder up in a tree protected them from the rising water. Below is a picture of the mic setup I used

At the end of the the above podcast episode is a mix of some of the recordings taken during the night and early morning. A few individual highlights are also in the links below. As you will hear from some of the recordings below, it was actually very difficult to get any recordings without the sounds of black grouse lekking in. Almost everywhere we went we could hear them, however, our main target was curlews out on the bogs and below is a recording of some display calls on one of the bog locations.

This next recording of some ospreys which were near the edge of one of the bog locations.

Below is a recording of a passing woodcock taken a few hundred yard into the forest on the edge of the bog. 

.. and finally this is a recording of some greenshanks in the one of the clearings in the forest nearby.

This area is a real gold mine for wildlife sound recordists and has such a great mix of different species. I will definitely be back with my full set of recording rigs at a later date because I think a really great sound library could be created from this location. I’d also be interested in visiting at different times of year to see how the soundscape changes when migratory species leave. 

Solway to Svalbard

A month or so ago I returned from an amazing month long trip to Svalbard. I was there on a residency working on a project called ‘Solway to Svalbard’ with two friends Stuart Macpherson and Emma Dove. The project is a creative response to the spring migration of the Barnacle Goose from the wetlands of the Solway Firth in South West Scotland to the Islands of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.

We have been creating audio/visual work by spending time in communities/environments (residencies, workshops, interviews) along the spring migration route: Caerlaverock (Solway), Selvær (Helgeland) and Longyearbyen (Svalbard).

All three of us spent some time together at Caerlaverock Wetlands Centre in South West Scotland filming and recording the geese back in spring 2017. Stuart then spent a month on Træna in northern Norway and then all three of us traveled to Svalbard for a month to film the geese at the farthest end of their journey where they breed and raise their chicks.

At this time of year the first thing you have to get used to when you arrive in Svalbard is 24 hour daylight. It is a very strange experience looking out your window at midnight and seeing bright sunlight so it took some getting used to. We were staying in Longyearbyen which is a small coal-mining town on Spitsbergen Island, in the Svalbard archipelago. The mining industry is slowing down and only one mine (mine 7) is still operational. Below is a picture of the coal cableway centre (Taubanesentrale) overlooking Longyearbyen.

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The town has become more focused on tourism than mining which means that it can go from very quiet to incredibly busy in the space of half an hour when one of the massive cruise ships arrive bringing often up to 4,000 people to the town. The town’s resident population is only around 2,000 people so the change is pretty dramatic.

This could make filming and recording sound quite difficult so we found that working from around 10.30pm to 3am seemed to get the best results as often the light was nice around this time and man made noise was at a minimum. The other main issues that needed to be worked around were cars and vans, the airport (although there aren’t that many flights they seem to happen at the worst possible times!), trucks going to and from mine 7, dogs howling and of course the problem of polar bears.

Although incidents are very rare, there is a real danger of being attacked by a polar bear near Longyearbyen if you aren’t careful, as the population in the Svalbard archipelago is now around 3,000 bears so most people carry a gun when leaving the town. A high powered hunting rifle is recommended for this but as none of us have gun licenses we decided to rent a car and use this as a form of polar bear protection. So we always had someone on bear watch and never strayed far from the car and this seemed to work well.

Just to the north west of Longyearbyen is Bjørndalen which is home to a large colony of little auks who nest up in the cliffs (shown below)

They make an amazing (and fairy comical) sound which echoes around the cliffs. Above is my setup for recording them. I am using my Senneheiser double mid-side rig (2 x mkh8040 1 x mkh 30) in a cinela blimp. The final piece of work we create will be played back on a surround speaker array so I wanted to get as many surround ambiences as possible while in Svalbard.

This is looking back down the track from Bjørndalen

We also got a visit from a curious arctic fox while in Bjørndalen and Emma managed to get a photo (shown below).

We regularly travelled to Adventdalen (shown below) a few miles east of Lonbyearbyen as this tended to be where the geese were situated. It was also home to lots of other wildlife like arctic terns, eider ducks, red throated divers, dunlin, purple sandpiper, grey phalarope, arctic skua and snow bunting (Svalbard’s only song bird).

Setting my mics up in Adventdalen

This is a recording of a male and female red throated divers calling to each other. It was made in 2019 in Svalbard on one of the small ponds in Adventdalen using a sony M10 recorder and two EM172 mics

This is a close up recording of barnacle geese with their chicks grazing in Adventdalen in Svalbard. It was made with a pair of clippy Em17 mics and a sony M10 recorder.

I also brought two smaller recorders - the Sony M10 and the Sony D100. These I used as ‘drop rigs’ which I would leave overnight in locations I thought might be likely to have some interesting sounds. These were pretty successful at times and I got some lovely close up recordings of the geese and chicks. When in Scotland the geese don’t have any chicks, as Svalbard is where they do all their breeding, so this was a sound I was particularly eager to get a recording of. Above is a recording of a pair of red throated divers and a recording of barnacle geese and chicks made with the sony M10 and two Clippy EM172 mics.

Towards the end of our trip we went to Pyramiden, an abandoned Russian coal mining settlement about 4 hours boat trip from Longyearbyen. The place was abandoned back in the 90s over just three days so it has an amazingly haunted quality. All the buildings are still full of peoples belongings, papers, musical instruments and anything that they didn’t have time to grab.

The place was founded in 1910 by Sweden then sold to the Soviet Union in 1927 and at one point held over 1,000 people. It now has only around 20 or so residents and is mainly populated by Kittiewakes which have moved into all the old abandoned buildings. There are also a large number of arctic foxes, a couple of which took a real liking to my mic. I think they thought there was a new lady in town!

Arctic foxes sniffing my sound gear! (photo by Stuart Macpherson)

The trip was amazing and we managed to get a lot of very good interviews from a wide range of people living in Svalbard, some amazing footage and a load of really nice recordings - so we all left feeling very happy. We now have to go through and edit all the material and plan the post production process. I am also planning to release a sound library of my recordings from Svalbard once they are fully edited and have had meta data added. We are planning to finish Solway to Svalbard sometime in 2020.

The Lynx Effect

This year I decided to take an earlier trip to Sweden in the hope of getting some recordings of species like black woodpecker and possibly even lynx or wolf (unlikely but you can always hope!). Again I went with Stefan Taylor, who owns a hut in the area of central Sweden I go to and knows the area well, and Richard Youell, a photographer and sound recordist. We decided to stay at ‘the old cottage’ bed and breakfast (shown above) which is a beautiful old traditional 17th century Swedish log cabin CLICK HERE .

The place is owned by John de Jong who has lived in the farm house next door with his family for around 12 years after moving from Holland. It is lovely, comfy and warm and proved a great place to return to after long recording trips and walks in the forest.

The last few years I have come to Sweden later in the year (towards the end of April) and the difference in the landscape earlier in the year is very noticeable. Snow was still deep on the ground and it reminded me of a book I used to love as a child called ‘The Tomten’ by Astrid Lingren. Especially at night, after it had snowed, the landscape had a magical quality and I half expected to see some Tomten footprints in the snow! An image from one of the Tomten books is shown below. Its amazing how much this image has stuck in my head. I think its part of the reason I feel drawn to places like Sweden and Norway.

A few days into the trip we took a trip to Farmansbo reserve. It was a very different experience to coming in April. Initially it seemed very quiet and barren but after trekking through the forest for half an hour or so things started to happen. It started to snow with big heavy beautiful snowflakes which seemed to fall in slow motion.

In my experience, this seems to happen a lot with nature: it takes around half and hour for you to tune into your environment and then you start to see things and things start to happen.

Suddenly we spotted some wolf footprints in the snow. John de Jong thought it looked like a lone female from the size of the prints. (Photo by Richard Youell). No other sign of her though but the tracks were fairly fresh so we carried on.

Then the sun came out for a while and black and green woodpecker started to drum. When the sun comes out the bugs start to come closer to the surface of the trees which instantly makes the woodpeckers become more active.

Later on that day we got word that there were some Lynx in the area. It’s very rare to see Lynx, as they are very elusive creatures, so we were all very excited. In the whole 12 years John de Jong has lived in the area he has only seen them a handful of times. March seems to be the best time to see them in this area though as it is mating season and they are a bit more active but there are only around 30 in the whole region so this was very lucky.

We quickly headed to the area where they had been spotted and lo and behold at the edge of a clearing in the forest there were two fully grown wild Lynx in their full winter coats! We couldn’t quite believe it. The encounter was very short lived (only around 3 minutes) but Richard managed to get a couple of pictures (shown below).

Such an amazing experience to see them up close! It took me quite a while to process it. Sadly there was no time to get any sound recordings but just seeing them was enough to make the whole trip worthwhile. The Lynx tracks are show below (photo by Richard Youell). They are easily confused with hare tracks as hare rear paws look similar in the snow but they can be distinguished by the size of the front paws as hare’s front paws are much smaller.

Another highlight of the trip was heading out in one of John de Jong’s canoes early in the morning. I decided I would try and get a wee video and do a binaural recording. The results are below. I was using my own head with two DPA 4060s on my ears. A better solution might have been to use a dummy head and put it at the front of the canoe to avoid the noise from my breaths all the winter clothing I had on but in some ways this adds to the listening experience so I was fairly happy with it and I didn’t have a dummy head with me anyway so the only option was to use my own head!

Overall it proved quite a difficult time of year to get good recordings as, although there was generally very little wind, there was quite a lot of sleet and snow. Also, lots of geese showed up a few days into the trip which caused problems, as they are noisey buggers, but there were a large numbers of black woodpeckers and green woodpeckers which were drumming pretty much throughout the day at this time of year and seeing the lynx more than made up for any sound recording struggles.

Stefan Taylor runs trips to the black river valley in April and May so if you are interested check it his website here

Sweden Trip - Part Two

So it's time for round two! After having such a great time last year visiting the Black River Valley in central Sweden I decided to go again this year. As I mentioned in my blog post from last year, the trip is organised by Stefan Taylor with help from Kari Knight and is aimed at sound recordists or just people with an appreciation of nature. The area has been designated a European Natura 2000 site outstanding for its nature and wildlife and is a wonderful place to record. What I loved so much last time about the area was the amazing moss and lichen covered pine forests and beautiful lakes and of course the quiet!

This time my goals were to get a good recording of the Capercaillie lek and to get a whole host of different surround sound ambiences. To say I was excited about returning to Sweden would be an understatement. I have had a long run of work shooting various corporate videos and working from my studio, so I was really looking forward to some time in the forest away from it all.

I also recently decided to upgrade my mkh 40/mkh 30 mid-side stereo rig to a double mid side rig with two matched mkh 8040s. This was partly because I have been doing more and more work involving surround so this felt like the next logical step. I chose this setup mainly for its portability, small size and flexibility. Double mid side recording can be decoded to a variety of different formats from mono to 5.1. I am also friends with the recordist George Vlad https://mindful-audio.com/ who uses this rig regularly and is happy with it. I often find the best way to find out if a piece of kit is going to suit your needs is to talk to someone who uses it regularly. I tend not to trust online reviews anymore as you can never tell if the person has been sponsored by the the company who make the piece of kit.

I have to say I actually prefer the sound of the Schoeps DMS rigs but the cost, and stories of problems with moisture put me off as a lot of the recording I do is in Scotland where days without rain are a lot less common than days with rain. I also often record in countries that have very high humidity and didn't want to risk this effecting my recordings.

I decided to buy a Cinela pianissimo to house all three mics. Matt and Nathan at Wendy's broadcast made me up cables with helpful colour coding so it is clear which channel is which. All my initial tests seemed to go very well so now it was time to try it out in the wilderness. The weather looked like it was going to be quite mixed so it seemed as if I would be putting the Cinela through its paces. The rig is shown below. Its a thing of beauty and I was amazed at how good it was at dealing with the wind. Even with the fluffy wind jammer off!

After arriving I headed straight out into the forest. There was a lovely evening chorus going on with lots of distant song thrush singing with a few woodcock passing every now and then. Sunday I heard some heavy breathing and a loud squealing sound and two wild boar marched into the clearing I was in. I smelled them before I saw them! They viewed me cautiously for a few minutes and then ran off back into the forest with a loud grunt. I was still pretty tired from my journey so I headed back to the house for a dinner of Swedish meatballs prepared by Kari and a glass of wine. This was a good chance to meet the other people on the trip with me. There was Daan Hendricks, a sound designer and sound library creator, Stijn Demeulenaere, a sound artist, Tony Fulford, a fellow member of WSRS and bird expert, Juan Monge a sound editor from Spain, Stefan Pigeon who used to work for Roland and now runs the website www.mynoise.net and Michael Garner a sound recordist who is also a member of WSRS and Ben Chinn who is a ecology student doing work experience with Stefan. It was a great chance to talk to like minded people about the intricacies of recording wildlife.

The next evening at around 5pm I headed for the caper hide. I setup my mics in a spot near where a caper has been seen lekking the previous morning and ran cables back to the hide. I disguised the mics with some scrim and covered the cables with some leaves and Moss being careful that nothing was knocking against the mics. The capers at this lek site can sometimes be active from around 7.30pm till 9.30pm and then from around 4am till 12pm which meant there was a chance I could be in the hide for around 16.5 hours. So I prepared myself for a long stay. Below is the hide I was in and the mics.

Right on cue at around 7.30 a caper landed in a tall tree above my mics with an almighty crash. They seem to deliberately make as much noise as possible when they arrive to roost to show of their size and strength to females and potential rivals. This caper called and flapped his wings repeatedly for eventually settling down to roost at around 9am creating a lovely black silhouette against the light blue night sky. Woodcock passed by and I could hear snipe drumming late into the night.

I fell asleep around 11pm and then woke again at 3.30am. I checked my recorder was still running and that all the levels seemed ok and then lay back and listened as the dawn chorus started. The caper was still perched on the same branch high in a nearby tree. Suddenly at around 4.15am he flew down onto the moss below and started to call. I could hear other capers in the distance in all directions and every time one called..

My caper would respond by calling, flapping it's wings and leaping in the air in the direction of the calls. He was roughly 20m away from the hide and for the rest time I got the chance to really see for myself how colourful capers are. Like many birds, from a distance they just look black but when you look closer they have amazing metallic greens and blues and all shades in between. They also two bright white shoulder spots, which are very helpful for spotting them in low light, and wonderful bright red patch above their eyes. Below is a photo by Stefan Taylor of the caper near the hide I was in.

This male was a particularly impressive specimen with a large hooked beak. The size of this hook and how curved it is gives you a rough idea of the caper's age and this caper had a massive beak with a huge hook so he was obviously pretty old.

I got a good recording of him arriving in the trees to roost but, although he was displaying for quite a long time the recordings I got of the display song were a bit distant sounding.

This is a short clip of a capercailllie landing in a tree to roost. Recorded with a mkh 30, 2 x mkh 8040 DMS rig in central Sweden. Photo by Stefan Taylor.

I was getting closer to getting the recording I wanted but wasn't quite there yet so I decided to have another shot the next night at a slightly different location. I setup my double mid side rig and disguised it with some scrim and branches again. I think this is always worth doing as birds seem to come closer and you get less alarm calls in your recordings when the rig is well hidden and blends in with the environment.

I spotted a likely display area a hide some mics on the moss so I also setup my Olympus LS-14 and a pair of Clippy EM172 mics. One thing I have discovered whilst trying to get a good caper recording is that the display call they make actually doesn't carry very far so to get a decent recording you have to get the mics very close.

I have figured out that with both of the setups I use I can get around 16 hours recording time. This turned out to be very handy as we tended to setup the mics at around 6pm and then pick them up around 10am the next morning to be sure we didn't disturb the capers.

I set both recorders running, checked I had formatted the cards, and check I had pressed record and headed back to the house for some dinner. It was reassuring to discover that all the other recordists have a deep paranoia about whether they have pressed record when they are leaving mics unattended. I now tend to check around three or more times! The house we were staying in was a traditional Swedish farms house that was warm and comfy and a lovely place to head back to to backup cards and take stock.

The next morning I went back and picked up the recorders and mics and headed home to see what I had. I tend to look at my recordings through a spectrogram as I find it saves time when finding interesting bits of sound. I have also started to be able to quickly recognize calls and can put in markers to help with editing later. To my excitement there were some really good looking recordings and when I listed I was happy to find that they sounded as good as they looked. Below is a mono version of a recording with the Clippy EM172 mics and the Olympus LS-14. Its a short clip of the whole recording.

This is a short clip of a close up recording of a capercaillie lekking. It was recorded with an Clippy EM172 mic into an olympus LS-14 in central Sweden. Photo by Stefan Taylor.

Early the next morning at around 3am we went to a nearby forest to record the dawn chorus I got a few nice ambience recordings and then right as we were leaving I spotted a pigmy owl in a nearby tree. They are the world smallest owl but often take on prey their own size. Below is a picture by Stefan Taylor.

For the final night I headed out on a canoe to try and get some good surround sound recordings of frogs and toads calling. There was also a bittern on the lake near where we were staying and I have no good recordings of these so that was another target for the night. Bitterns make a very deep bassy call with three clicks before it. These click sounds are the inhaling air into their a huge air bladder in their neck. Sadly I didn't manage to get a recording of the bittern on its own but I still like the recording.

This is a short clip of a recording made from a canoe on the Black River Valley in central Sweden. It is a mono version of a surround recording.

I absolutely love this way of recording. I wedge the tripod legs at the front end of the canoe and the slowly and carefully paddle to where I hear a sound I want to record. I then wedge the canoe on some reeds so that I don't get a moving sound image. It's proved a good way to get close to some species I would otherwise have had real trouble getting close to. It's takes a bit of nerve as I realised I had around £6,000 worth of kit in the canoe but I think as long as you don't go out when it's too windy it tends to be fine.

I ended up staying out on the lake till around 2 am and just headed back when I started to get too cold. It's was a very bright night with a full moon and I went to sleep with the sounds of bittern and frogs swirling round my head. The next day I headed home tired but happy.

I plan to make a sound library from all these recordings but i think it might take one more trip before I have enough high quality and varied recording to put a  library together. It's good to have finally ticked capercaillie off the list though.

Caerlaverock WSRS Field Meeting

I grew up in a small village called Balmaclellan in south west Scotland so I was glad to find out that the Wildlife Sound Recording Society winter field meeting was going to be held a Caerlaverock WWT reserve near Dumfries. This reserve was the first I went to when I was a child and I have been regularly since then to record.

I have also recently been doing a project with a couple of friends, composer Stuart Macphearson and film maker Emma Dove, about barnacle geese, so I have been going to the reserve for this reason too. Also, as I am based in Edinburgh, the fact it is in Scotland was a massive plus. Party because Scotland is just a much better country than England but also because it meant I wouldn't have to travel as far.

I was staying in the farm house which has nice comfy clean rooms and a great kitchen where we could all meet up and have a blether. It was a great place to get to know new people I haven't met before and compare notes with my fellow sound geeks. More importantly it was warm! This fact became more and more important as the weekend went on as the temperature dropped well below freezing as the weekend went on.

The first night I decided to waste no time and to get out recording as soon as possible. As soon as it got dark I setup a pair of Clippy EM172 mics and a small Olympus LS-14 recorder in a dry bag near one of the many badger sets on the reserve. This is what I tend to use as a rough and ready rig for doing unattended recordings as you can get around 14 hrs or so out of a couple of Eneloop pro AA batteries with this rig. I also use a sound devices 633 and a mkh30/mkh40 Mid-Side rig but I don't leave this rig out unattended quite as much for obvious reasons.

The first night was slightly windy but there were moments of calm through the night and during one of these periods of calm I managed to get a nice recording of a badger investigating my mics. Sadly no vocalizations but some very nice sniffs and movements. The recording is below -

This is a recording of a badger sniffing at my mics made at Caerlaverock WWT reserve near dumfries. It was made with two Clippy EM172 mics and an Olympus LS-14 recorder

Anyone who has recorded at Caerlaverock before knows about the dreaded milking machine. This is a machine in the farm yard which comes on early in the morning and makes a right old racket. Very annoying! The only way to get around this is to setup your mics at the very far end of the reserve or to try and get recordings that are so close to the subject that the signal to noise ratio means that the sound from the milking machine wasn't as much of a problem.

I decided to go for the latter. So my goal for this trip was to try and get really close up recordings of flocks of barnacles grazing. I had noticed on previous trips that barnacles make a very strange kind of humming drone as they graze. The sound they make is almost like a distant plane if you hear it from far away, and it confused me a few times during the day but when you hear the sound close up it is loads of small contact calls between the geese as they graze.

So early the next morning I decided to leave both sets of mics out in a location where I had seen the barnacles the day before. When it got fully dark I setup my Clippy EM172 mics and Olympus LS- 14 about 10m into the field. I used the Chris Watson technique of placing the mics at either end of a wire coat hanger and the buried the recorder, cable and coat hanger in the grass and earth. I checked the mics were working and the levels were set correct and then left it at around 4am. I also setup my mkh30/mkh40 rig on a long stereo cable which I ran back to one of the hides and plugged into my SD 633.

I then quietly headed back to the farm house. Which gave me a chance to have a look at the sky. It was an amazingly clear and still night and you could see the milky way right across the sky. This is one thing I have always loved about south west Scotland; the sky is so clear and free of light pollution. Both Richard Youell and George Vlad got some great long exposure shots of the night sky.

I am not generally a fan of unattended recording, as I like the experience of listening and tuning in to the environment, but I had been very busy with a string of film shoots before the meeting so I wanted to try and treat this trip as a bit of a holiday and to make sure I got enough sleep and didn't end up driving back up to Edinburgh feeling more tired than when I arrived! So I decided to make a exception this time and leave my mics out.

Around 9am the next morning I went to check on my mics. I wouldn't be able to collect them again till it got dark to avoid disturbance but I wanted to see if the flocks of geese were anywhere near them. To my great excitement they were! Through my binoculars I could see that a large flock of geese were grazing right of top of where I had hidden the EM172s. I stayed for around 2 hrs watches as the flock moved right across the area where I had placed my mics. Below is a small clip from the recording I got.

This is a recording of a flock of barnacle geese up close made with a pair of clippy EM172 mics and a Olympus LS 14 recorder

I went back to the farm house to eat some lunch and on the way got mobbed by a small robin who obviously got regularly fed by people. He seemed very upset that I had nothing to offer so the next time I came past to check my mics again later in the day, I took some dried mealworms. He was very tame and would even fly up and sit on your hand if you stayed very still.

I walked along to the Saltcot Merse Observatory and watched the sunset and then headed back for dinner. When I got back to the farm house one of the local badgers had arrived. The rangers put out peanut butter on the rocks and posts round the front of the farm house and a rather portly looking badger had arrived to eat his dinner. I was a great opportunity to see badgers up close.

By 10.30pm it was dark enough to collect my mics so I headed out to pick them up, trying not to step on the icey puddles that had formed on the path. I did my best but there were a couple of loud crashes as I put my foot down in the wrong place. I retrieved my mics and went back to listen to the recordings.

I had a few decent passes of whooper swans and barnacle gees on my mid-side rig but by far the best were the recordings on the Olympus LS-14. The geese had come so close you could clearly hear them eating the grass next to the mics. The recording is actually quite funny to listen to as you can hear how much sqabbling goes on between individuals as the flock grazes.

Sadly I had to head back up to Edinburgh on the Sunday night, as I had a job on the Monday morning but I drove home feeling very pleased and glad to have got the chance to see some old friends and make some new ones.

Making Beats With Old Records

This is a quick demo of how to make beats by scratching the locked groove of an old record. This is a method used by Nick Zammuto from one of my favourite bands 'The Books'. Great fun wee trick! Different scratches give you different sounds and if you use sand paper to make a larger mark you can make a 'hi-hat' or cymbal type sound. Getting the scratches where you want them is very trial and error so have a few spare records about if you're going to give it a try. (I got a stack for 50p each from my local charity shop.) I've used small poster pins to make the scratches and, as they are in the locked groove of the record, they don't damage the actual music groove of the record, as shown in the video below:

A quick demo of how to make beats by scratching the locked groove of an old record... I added some live delay and reverb in ableton and a few dubby chords for good measure. This is a trick used by Nick Zammuto from one of my favorite bands 'The Books'.

I added some effects live in ableton and a played a few dubby chords underneath to make it a bit more interesting. The effects I've used are izotope trash 2 (which is the fuzz/distortion effect you hear come in first), valhalla delay and a lexicon reverb..

Sweden Trip

I recently got back from a great field recording trip to the Black River Valley in central Sweden. The trip was organised by Stefan Taylor, Kari Knight and Richard Youell and looked like a great chance to go recording somewhere I have never been before, so I decided to give it a go. Stefan is a naturalist who has owned a small cabin in the area since 2009. He knows the area well and has been scoping out the best spots for recording particular species for the last 10 years. He is the first port of call for finding out where and when to go to get good recordings. Richard is a fellow sound recordist and landscape photographer and Kari is a Yoga instructor and journalist who helped with the cooking and organisation of the trip. Also on the trip with us was Anthony Mcgeehan, a wildlife photographer and writer from Ireland.  CLICK HERE to see some of Anthony's pictures.

I had a very busy period of work during April shooting films up in the highlands and over in Sardinia so I thought this would be a good chance to get a break (even if I would still be sound recording!). I also thought it would be a great chance to hear a capercaillie lek as numbers in Sweden are much higher than in Scotland and Stefan had found some spots where he had heard them lekking.

Flights from London Stansted to Vasteras airport only take around 2 hours and then its just a 40 min car journey to where we were staying. This part of Sweden is very flat with lots of hay fields and large pine forests with small patches of birch clumped together at the edges of the fields and lots of small lakes dotted throughout the landscape. There are lots of small huts which are all painted a lovely kidney bean red. Some of the houses we passed looked a bit like they are from a horror movie or some kind of scandi noir like the killing... but most are just lovely old fashioned summer houses often built round the edges of the lakes. The cabin I was staying in is below and stefan's house is in the photo below that. 

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The thing that strikes you, when you first arrive, is the lack of people and the huge number of forestry tracks. Without Stefan as our guide we would have got lost pretty quickly! The forest was largely pine and the land very flat, a big difference from the hills and hard wood forests of Scotland where I usually record. I initially found it pretty bleak, but this feeling faded quickly as soon as I got out into the forest and discovered quite how much wildlife there was on offer. 

After arriving I decided not to waste any time and to head straight out to the caper lek. Stefan had already setup a hide and had spent the last few nights trying to discover where they were tending to lek. Capercaillie leks are famously unpredictable. They are not like black grouse, which tend to lek in exactly the same position each year. The area of the lek tends to be over at least four square miles of pine forest and they will often move to a slightly different place to call and display each morning.

The hide (shown below) Stefan had setup was very luxurious compared to a lots of hides I had slept in in the past. It was a hunting hide with handy viewing windows and enough space for me to lie down if I angled myself from corner to corner. 

As it had been very cold recently in Sweden, Stefan had packed it with bedding and gave me his heavy winter sleeping bag to sleep in,  so I never felt the cold. To avoid disturbance I entered the hide around 6pm and stayed till I could no longer hear any caper activity. This usually happened around 9 or 10am. So it was a long stint in the hide! Kari made me up some lovely sandwiches and a flask of tea and I popped into the shop and got myself some amusingly named Swedish chocolate. Shown below.

Within the first hour I heard snipe 'drumming', black grouse, woodcock, roe deer calls, black birds, mistle thrush, song thrush, ravens, chaffinch, great tits and whooper swans in the distance. I first heard capers at around 8pm. At night they tend to arrive at dusk to roost and make an almighty crash as they land high in the trees. They then have a look about to see if its safe and sometimes come down out of the trees to display or just call from the trees. However, the majority of activity tends to happen in the morning from the first light onwards. The calls sound to me like an entire farm yard of animals in one bird: there are pig-like grunts and squeals, clicks and pops that sound like the clip-clop of horse's hooves (For this reason they are often know as 'horse of the woods') and a variety of other weird and wonderful sounds. How much activity there is depends very much on the weather so if the wind is high or there is a lot of rain they will tend not to call very much if at all.

It's quite exciting to hear them arrive and strangely that night they did a lot of calling from around 8pm till about 9.30 and then not very much in the morning. Sadly the calls were coming from too far away for me to get a decent recording. Richard however got a great recording. He had left his mics around 300m from where I was, slightly further up the hill. Richard tends to use a dummy head and record in binaural so best listened to on headphones. He was using EM172 electret mics and recording into LS-11. As Richard explained, these mics are plugin power rather than phantom power which makes them very good for leaving our over night unattended as they don't use up batteries very quickly. They are also only £68 for a stereo pair and have a similar noise floor to DPA 4060s. Here is the website that sells them CLICK HERE

The next day we took a trip to Farmansbo reserve. It is a lovely old woodland with huge pine trees and amazing lichen and moss formations. Half way through the walk we heard a goshhawk calling. We then discovered there was a nest directly above us and saw a male fly away. The first time I've seen a goshhawk in the wild!

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That night I decided to try and record black throated diver at a local lake. I set up my mics on the far side of the lake and sat listing as the sun went down. I heard a black woodpecker off to my left as I arrived . They drum at an amazing volume and sound a bit like a machine gun. A lot louder than the great spotted woodpeckers I'm used to hearing back in Scotland. I could see the black throated divers were on the lake through my binoculars but there were a few Canada geese on the lake that I think someone had been feeding. They kept coming over towards my mics calling a making a right racket; quite annoying!

Then eventually the black throated divers called. Once right in front of my mics and then again slightly off to the right. I love the sound with the echo from the forest around the lake. As the sun went down woodcock started roding in the forest behind me and I heard snipe drumming off to my left and the bubbling calls of black grouse off in the distance . A lovely mix of different sounds!

On the final night I had one last go in the hide at the caper lek. I heard them crashing into the trees at around 8.40pm and then a few grunts but not much activity in the night.  Then the next morning they started calling at around 3.30am. The sound continued right through till around 9.30am. Again, sadly it was slightly too far from my mics to get a good recording but that gives me a reason to come back!

The trip overall was amazing. Such a lovely unspoiled part of the world. I came away with lots of lovely ambience recordings (some of which I've already used in film projects) and some great individual species recordings which will definitely get used in the next wildlife film I work on or even in dramas to slot in around dialogue. This area of Sweden is so full of wildlife and really is a sound recordists dream come true. I'll definitely be back! 

Massive thanks to Stefan Taylor for organising everything, Kari for all the wonderful food, Richard Youell for all the sound recording tips and Anthony for his amazing bird knowledge and ability to to mimic any birdsong on command!

Stefan runs trips in April and May so to book yourself on one of next year's trip email him at stefantaylor61@gmail.com . 

Cassette Tape Loops

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Here's is my first proper attempt at making a 10s tape loop. I have made short 5s loops before, which are fairly easy to make, but I wanted to try making a longer loop. Above is a picture of the loop I made. It is made from a length of tape around 41cm joined together with a tiny piece of scotch tape. I left some tape on the reel on the right (shown below) and stuck it down to allow some space for the tape to move past the reel on the left. The join is made on the underside of the tape which is slightly duller and more matte looking. Make sure you have some scotch tape, some scissors, a tape measure and a small phillips head screw driver if you're giving it a go.

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You can then record whatever you want onto your loop. I the recorded an ambient drone and played it through some delay and reverb (shown in the video below). There is also a bit of fuzz added from izotope trash. What I love about using these loops is that it gives you an endless, constantly evolving sound. Ideally I would be making loops on a proper 1/4 tape reel to reel machine but this will have to do for now!

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This is a video of a tape loop I made. The loop is around 10 seconds long and is being played through some delay and reverb. A short description of how to make a similar loop can be found at http://www.thesoundspace.co.uk/pete-smith/

Using an old 4 track as an Instrument

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I have just finished a big sound design project and have a few days before another job starts. I also recently noticed a few videos online of people using 4 track cassette recorders to make interesting drones so I decided to give it a go while I had some spare time. I have an old Tascam porta studio 414 mk 11 so I thought I'd dust it off and have a go. Basically the technique involves recording 4 different notes or chords to the 4 tracks and then using the gain adjustment of each track to bring the notes in and out. This allows you to play the 4 track like an instrument by playing the chord progressions or adding and taking away the notes of a chord. The technique is made easier if you record to a tape loop as then there is no need to constantly rewind the tape. The downside of doing it this way is that you usually hear the loop ending and beginning again, although this can be made less noticeable by adding reverb and delay. You can either buy tape loops or make you own (this is fairly fiddly but good fun - I'll demonstrate how in a later blog post). If you don't use a loop then the trick is to record each of the 4 notes at a length which means they don't end as you are playing your drone. So if the sound you want is around 4 minutes then, to be safe, record each note for around 5 mins so you have a bit of leeway. On the PS 414 there is also a pitch knob, EQ and pan controls which you can play with as you are creating your drone. Below is a rough video of me demonstrating the technique (and being a bit over jealous with the pitch wheel!). I think the cassette gives the sound a lovely woolly Lo-Fi quality but this is maybe a product of being a teenager in the 90s and spending all my time recording tunes off the radio! I've made the sounds on ableton's 'analog' (very basic pad sounds) and am running it all through a digitech 'polara' reverb pedal.

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Uploaded by Pete Smith on 2017-02-20.

Skokholm Island

Skokholm island is a small island of the south-west tip of Pembrokeshire. I have been planning a trip there for around 5 months primarily to record the sound of manx shearwaters returning to their burrows but I also hoped to get some recordings of puffins and other species like the storm petrel and possibly razorbills and guillemots.

I first heard manx shearwaters when I was in my early teens. I was on the isle of Eigg off the west coast of scotland and heard some really strange sounds echoing off the cliffs near laig bay as I walked back to my tent at around 11pm. I was informed by people in the know that this was the sound of manx shearwaters returning to their burrows. They do it by night to avoid predators and very dark cloudy nights seem to be the best time to hear them as they tend to come back in greater numbers. The female (who has a lower, gruffer call) usually stays in the burrow while the male goes to sea to feed and bring back food.

I have never heard or seen them since that time on Eigg and it had really made an impression on me so I decided to try and get a recording. I thought my best chance to get a good one was to go to Skokholm as there are around 45,000 pairs on the island. Its a 10 hr drive from Edinburgh to catch the boat at Martin's Haven so it was going to be a long trip.

The island is managed by the Welsh Wildlife Trust and has two wardens Richard Brown and Giselle Eagle. Here's an Interview with them from back when they first became wardens.  Here is some Info about staying on the island and here is Richard and Giselle's blog

The trip down went ok although around 4 hrs into the journey the car started to make a weird rattling sound which was a bit disturbing as I had to be back for work after the trip.... But I eventually made it down to Marloes, where I was staying in a small B & B. I then got a call from Richard saying the boat on the Monday would be cancelled as the wind was too high which was a bit of a shame as it would mean one less day of recording. This is something to keep in mind if you are ever heading out to Skokholm - boats are quite often cancelled due to weather (the captains decision is final) so there is a chance that you might get stuck on the island or not get onto it all all if the weather is too bad.

I got over to the island on Tuesday though. The boat trip was fairly 'lumpy' as the captain said but we all made it in one piece. The accommodation on Skokholm has been upgraded over the last few years and there are four twin rooms and one double bedded room in the renovated cowsheds, one twin room and four single rooms in the cottage, plus a further two twin rooms in the warden’s old quarters. There is also hot and cold running water (solar powered) to the bedrooms, a communal lounge in the cottage which has a multi fuel stove. Pretty great all in all!

I got out recording every night of the stay. The first night was slightly too windy to get good recordings but it was a good chance to scout out possible locations and on the second night the wind dropped and I managed to get some decent recordings. Below is a short clip of a recording made with my mkh 30/mkh 40 M/S rig. The shearwaters started to return at around 10.20pm and peaked at about 11.30pm. This clip is from 11.46pm and was made on the 4th of May.

Here is a recording made with a single DPA 4060 placed at the entrance to a burrow. Its a female calling to a male from the burrow.

There were also chances to record puffins during the day. Crab Bay seemed to be a good spot for this. I have never seen so many puffins! They were wheeling round the hide at amazing speeds. They seemed to be most vocal at around 8.30pm. I found it a very hard call to record though as it is quite quiet and the sea was quite close. I ended up pointing the mics away from the sea and using the hide to block the sound of the waves. Not the greatest recording but still an amazing sound!

WSRS 'silver fox' winner!

Really happy to have won the WSRS 'silver fox' award for wildlife sound recording! I won a very cool looking shiny silver fox trophy and a pair of DPA 4060s.

Nightjar

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I have always found the sound of nightjar really interesting. I think its partly because they sound so other worldly, strange and weirdly musical. They sound to me a bit like white noise filtered with an LFO on an old synth like a moog voyager and have a wonderful woody quality. They also look really strange and are so well camouflaged you can walk right past them very easily without noticing. In spite of this interest I have only ever heard recordings and have never heard them in the wild so I decided to try and get a recording for myself. After asking around I found out a good spot not too far from Edinburgh is Dalby forest in Yorkshire. I spoke to a local bird ringing group who kindly agreed to take me out and show me some good spots. They also took me out ringing nightjar with them which was amazing as it allowed me to see them up close. To put the rings on nightjar they are caught using large nets and then weighed and measured and a small metal ring is placed round their leg so that they can be identified in the future and data can be gathered about their health and movements.

Getting so close to them allowed me to spot a few details that I would never have spotted otherwise. The first was that they have really tiny little feet. Much smaller than birds like robins or warblers whose body size is much smaller. You can also see their eyes through the roof of their mouth. One of the guys I was with thought that this allowed them to actually see through the roof of their mouth as they open it to catch moths, which are their primary food source. Pretty amazing!

Here is a picture of us setting up the nets and of one of the nightjar we caught:

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Nightjar are nocturnal and usually start singing, or 'churring' as its often called, around 10pm. The best place to go is spots of clearfelling that are around 2 or 3 years old so that the vegetation has started to grow back a bit and from 10pm onwards, depending on the weather, they will move around the clearing 'churring' from various points till about 2am. If the weather isn't good they will often stop around 11.30pm.

I also found that they tend to have a favorite spot to sing from so when you have identified this location you can be pretty sure the nightjar will sing from the same place at some point during the next night.  This is very handy as it allows you to set up you mics for recording. Below is a recording made with my parabolic reflector. It has been EQed slightly. The recording isn't perfect as you can hear a little bit of hiss due to the fact I didn't quite get close enough and had to turn up the gain but I was happy with it and the fact its not quite perfect gives me a excuse to go back and have another go!

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Here's another recording, this time in stereo, with two nightjars singing towards each other. You get some nice phasing sounds as the two songs interact.

Black Grouse Lek

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I have tried to get a recording of a black grouse lek a few times this year with varying degrees of success. A friend told me about a lek in Dumfries and Galloway and I spent three mornings recording and only managed to get some very distant recordings. I did however get some nice recordings of snipe and curlew so the trips weren't completely in vain. Then around a week ago another friend told me about a different spot that sounded very promising so I decided to check it out. I arrived at about 5 am and sat in my car waiting. I had decided not to bring my mics as I always find it useful to check out the location first and plan how to record in it before bringing along my kit. I also didn't have permission from the landowner yet so I just watched with my binoculars. At around 5.30am I started to hear the characteristic calls of lekking male black grouse. They sound a bit like a combination pigeons cooing and someone letting air out of a tyre and make some pretty funny sounds. There were around 4 leks going on in the valley and the main lek had around 10 displaying males so I decided to come back with my kit in the next few days. Three days later the weather forecast predicted wind speed of 3mph at 6am so I decided to come down the night before to setup. I contacted to landowner  and arrived in the evening to setup a hide. This consisted of a small green tent covered in camo netting with some grass weaved in to try and make it blend in as much as possible. A little bit ramshackle, but it did the job!

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I set my mics up on 70m of cable, buried the first 10m and covered the mic in scrim. I thought it would be best to record in stereo to try and get some of the interaction of the group so I used my mkh 30/ mkh40 mid-side rig. The only problem was the sound from a small river at the bottom of the valley but I decided I could live with that as it was reasonably distant.

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It was a beautiful starry night but was bloody freezing so I didn't get much sleep. I woke around 4am and recorded from 4.30am till 8am. Sadly everything past around 7am was covered in the sounds of planes, cars and quad bikes which was very frustrating but some of the stuff from before then was quite nice. Below is a short clip of one of the recordings and some more pictures I took from the hide.

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Below is a recording of a nice interaction between two males. Sadly I had to low cut it at around 100Hz to remove wind noise but its still nice to listen to.

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The Lammermuirs

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The Lammermuirs are a range of hills around 40 mins drive from Edinburgh near Gifford. I am always looking for new places to go recording and this spring I was recording a lot in Blinkbonny wood near Longyester. There is a track which runs past Blinkbonny wood and is the start of a great walk which you can do to Lammer Law and when I was recording woodpeckers at Blinkbonny wood I heard a large number of red grouse calling at around 5.30am .

I have never managed to get a good close perspective recording of red grouse, only very distant ones, so I decided to come back and try to get a decent recording over the next few days. I arrived at the start of the track just past Blinkbonny wood at around 3.30am parked the car and headed into the hills. I set up my mid-side rig on a 30m of cable and sat behind a small rise and listened. Luckily as I was in a valley there was very little noise from the farms nearby.

Soon I started to hear large numbers of Lapwing or Peewit as they are sometimes called. I could also hear red grouse, curlew, snipe 'drumming' and later on skylarks started to sing. There was an amazing mix of species and I heard around 20 male grouse calling from around the valley I was in. Really great to find another good place to go recording near Edinburgh! Below is a spectrogram of a clip of the recording I made with grouse calls on the left, lapwing in the middle and snipe 'drumming' on the right, and below that is the recording itself (Best listened to on headphones)

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Here's another recording made on a slightly more windy morning. Nice close up snipe at 30s and 1.34.

Yellowhammer Dialects

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I came across this project http://www.yellowhammers.net/ a while back and decided to try and get some recordings to help with their research. It's a really interesting project by a group of Czech ornithologsts and ecologists which is studying the different dialects yellowhammers have in different locations. This page tells you how to differentiate the various types of song http://www.yellowhammers.net/about .. just click on "how can you recognize its song". Thanks to John Webley for the above photo! Here's his websitehttps://johnwebley.smugmug.com 

The best place to find yellowhammers is generally in the countryside in hedgerows and bushes near farmland so I headed to a patch of farmland near Gifford just south of Edinburgh. I arrived at around 4.00am and at around 5.00 I heard some males singing from the top of a beech hedge. Due to the fact that the recordings were going to be analyzed by the ' yellow hammer dialects' project's technicians I thought the best style of recording would be mono and with my parabolic reflector so the song was as isolated as possible from any surrounding noise.

I set up my mics and reflector on a tripod as close as I could get to one of the singing males. Yellowhammers have a high pitched ‘chitty-chitty-chitty…sweee’ song which is often characterized as the phrase 'little bit of bread and no cheese'. In many dialects you should add an additional 'please' to the end of this phrase. Here's the recording I got so see what you think. I've included a spectrogram of the song which is in the 'BC' dialect.

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It was actually quite difficult to get a decent recording as the yellowhammers would often flit from one perch to another and would only sing for short periods from each position.  The reflector is also very directional so I had to keep adjusting it. I always find it a difficult decision when recording wildlife whether to stay in one position or to chase the subject. In this case very carefully and slowly following the yellowhammers and then backing off and hiding when one started to sing seemed to get the best results when using a reflector.

Here's a link to some more info on yellowhammers http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/y/yellowhammer/index.aspx

Caerlaverock WWT reserve

I've been really busy for the last few months working on various films so I haven't had much of a chance to get out recording but I did recently go down for a day to Caerlaverock WWT reserve down near Dumfries. I am a member of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society (WSRS) and they are working with the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) to help promote the sounds on their reserves. The recorded sounds will be used by the WWT to promote the signature sounds of each reserve throughout the year via their website, podcasts and in theatre presentations on the reserves. Above is a picture of the reserve by Sylvia Duckworth. I volunteered to do some recording at Caerlaverock because I grew up in South West Scotland and went to the reserve as a kid. Roger Broughton, another WSRS member, also volunteered so I'm looking forward to swapping tricks and tips!

We visited the reserve together a few months ago and had a look around. Caerlaverock (http://www.wwt.org.uk/visit/caerlaverock/plan-your-visit/) is a great reserve with all sorts of wildlife including ospreys, foxes, badgers, skylarks, various types of warblers... and many, many more types of bird of all shapes and sizes. In the winter huge flocks of barnacle geese descend on the reserve making the most amazing sound. It has a great selection of paths and hides looking out on all corners of the reserve.

I spent the whole night at the reserve trying to record the badgers but didn't have much luck. I had either spooked them or they weren't feeling very vocal on that particular night. I'll have another go soon and post the results!

One thing that stood out was the vast number of bats! I could hear they're echo location just on the edge of my hearing range all through the night. Below is a spectrogram of one of the recordings I made. As you can see there is not much going on in the human hearing range (20-20,000Hz). But right at the top end starting around 20,000 Hz there are hundreds of echo location calls.

I think next time I go I will my bat detector and try and get some recordings. There were also loads of barn owls screeching throughout the night. Definitely a signature sound of the reserve.. at night at least!

The best recording of the trip, mainly because I haven't recorded them before, was a sedge warbler. I recorded it using my MKH 30/ MKH 40 M/S rig at around 3.30 am. Sadly there is a wee bit of low frequency noise from the farm buildings nearby but still worth a listen I reckon.

Dawn Chorus and Roe Deer

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I had a very weird experience the other day! I was recording the dawn chorus in Castle Wood near Gifford and had set up my mics at around 3.30am and ran 30m of cable back to a large pine tree with overhanging branches. The dawn chorus started slowly at around 3.40am with robins and song thrushes and then became more intense as blackbirds, pheasants, wrens, wood pigeons and various other birds joined in. Suddenly, at around 5am when the dawn chorus was starting to lose intensity, I heard a pair of roe deer barking. They gradually came closer until a female came into view. It slowly came towards me and came closer and closer until it was around 3m away!! It then lay down and just watched me for a few minutes. Very odd! It had definitely spotted me but didn't seem fussed at all.

Above is the picture I got as it started to move away and I could move and grab my camera. There is also a recording of the pair calling from around 10 minutes before. I will post a few more dawn chorus recording in the future  as I am planning to head out a few more times this month to try and get some more recordings before the birds start to nest and the chorus becomes less intense.

Warblers

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The UK has a huge variety of warblers with a wide range of differing songs and they are in full voice in May. Most stay in the UK right through the summer and they are generally twitchy little birds constantly hopping from branch to branch and singing intermittently. They are also quite shy, spending a large amount of their time concealed from view in amongst the undergrowth. This is especially true of the grasshopper warbler (above) which likes to stay on the ground in amongst tussocks and tall grass. Grasshopper warblers are small brown birds which are usually heard before they are seen. The best time to record them seems to be sunrise and sunset but they will sometimes sing on and off right through the day.

I recently went to a spot I had heard them around this time last year and sure enough around 5.30am I heard one singing from a patch of tussocks. I have found the best way to record them is with either a shotgun mic or parabolic reflector on a monopod or tripod as they sing for long periods and don't mind being approached if you are reasonably quiet and careful. I generally like to record individual species in mono and record habitats in stereo this gives you the freedom of making composite recordings by adding the sound of a particular species to a nice stereo recording of its habitat. Above is the mono recording I got and a picture of a grasshopper warbler by Jim Almond who kindly agreed for me to put it on my blog. Please check out his other pictures at http://shropshirebirder.co.uk/. I think the grasshopper warbler's song sounds a lot like a fly fishing reel or a tiny pneumatic drill! Its amazing quite how mechanical it sounds.

In a patch of trees very nearby there was also a willow warbler singing. These are slightly lighter color than the grasshopper warbler and are green rather than brown with a  pale yellowish breast. Again the best approach seems to be to locate them by sound and then setup your mic on a tripod at a suitable range (around 5-10m with a reflector), set your levels, and wait for a nice passage of song. Below is the recording I got along with another picture by Jim Almond.

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The two warblers I would like to try and record next are the wood warbler which has a song that has been described as sounding like a coin being spun on a marble slab, and the blackcap whos song can be heard if you click the play button on the right of this page: http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/b/blackcap/index.aspx

For info about other warblers please go to: http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/families/warblers.aspx

Curlews

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One of my all time favorite sounds is the sound of curlew display calls. In the spring and early summer curlews move in from the coastal areas to inland areas of moorland and wet patches of meadows to breed and find nesting sites. This happens in Scotland from around the end of March through to mid May depending on weather conditions. Then after they have paired up and found a nest site they begin to make display flights in large arches over and around the nest site. As they do this they make their characteristic song which starts with individual drawling note and becomes a wonderful rippling, bubbly trill. Curlews used to nest in the hills above my house in Dumfries and Galloway and I remember hearing the unmistakeable melancholy sound echoing round the hills when I was a child.

I have tried to record curlews in the past the results have never been that great. I know a place where they like to nest up near Loch Urr the only trouble with the location is that it is on quite a busy flight path so the best time to record seems to be at sunrise. The best time to record curlews, as with many birds, is either very early in the morning or at dusk as the sun is setting and the curlews are returning to their nests. I find that at this (April) time of year the two peak times are 5am or 6.30pm and due to the large amount of planes I went for early morning. Above is the first half decent recording I made. I arrived at 4.30am and set up my mics in a field next to a pine forest just above Loch Urr with a 30m cable run and retired to my car (which makes a very good hide when the temperature is around -2 outside!)  The curlew passes nicely across the stereo field. Sadly there is a bit of hiss because I have had to push the pre amps to their limit!

... And heres another longer recording with a mix of curlew display calls and snipe "drumming". "Drumming" is the name for the sound snipe make when they swoop over the nesting site and make a noise a bit like a kazoo or some kind of LFO effect. The sound is made by the wind rushing though their tail feathers. The picture is a spectrogram of a section of the recording which gives you a nice visual representation of the spectrum of the frequencies in the sound. The snipe drumming is to the left of the shot and the Curlew is mainly to the right.

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I also made a variety of mono recordings of curlew with my reflector. As I was trying to record curlew display calls which are made while the birds are flying, the reflector had to be hand held rather than on a tripod so I could follow the curlews as they passed. This meant avoiding handling noise was difficult even while wearing fleece gloves. These recording below was made in the evening just before sunset in between the passing planes.

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