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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Song Thrush Recording

A couple of weeks ago I went to visit my friend who lives near Haddington down below Edinburgh. I wanted to catch the dawn chorus so I got up at around 5am because I noticed at in Edinburgh the birds had been starting to sing about an hour and a half before sunrise which is around 7am at this time of year. The chorus isn't quite in full swing yet, as this usually happens in April, but I thought it would be a good time of year to get some nice mono recordings of individual species without too much clutter.

The first thing I noticed was how freezing cold it was! The sky was very clear and there was a frost so I was very glad to have dressed up warm and brought my gloves. The birds didn't really start to sing until around 6.20am and it was mainly just blackbirds, song thrushes, chaffinches great tits and blue tits. I noticed a particularly loud song thrush singing its heart out from the top of a small oak tree about 300 yards from my friends house so I set up my reflector on a tripod at the bottom of the tree. The song thrush seemed completely unfazed and carried on regardless!

In a previous post I said I would post some recordings made with the Telinga Parabolic Reflector so here one is. The recording above was made at 6.20am with the Sound Devices 302 mixer into a Marantz PMD 661 with the omni capsule on the reflector and is around 10m from the bird. There is also the sound of pheasants, wood pigeons and passing crows in the distance.

Telinga Parabolic Refector

As I mentioned in a previous post last year I bought a Telinga parabolic reflector. It is a Pro 8 with twin science mic so it has both cardioid and omni mic capsules which are output to the left and right channels simultaneously so you have options to choose between.

I have been out recording with it quite a lot and really like it. The mics do have quite a bright sound which is accentuated by the fact that bass frequencies go straight through the dish and I have found that to avoid handling noise you have to wear thick gloves and be very careful, or preferably mount it on a tripod (I use the universal mounting kit [CLICK HERE] for this). It also really doesn't like strong wind and even with a wind cover and using the omni capsule wind can be a problem. However, its portability and lightness more than make up for this. The dish can be rolled up for transporting (although it shouldn't be left rolled up for any great length of time) and the parts all fit together simply and neatly. The mics are also very low self noise and having the choice between omni and cardioid is really brilliant!

The first (and easily solved) problem I came across was that I couldn't initially tell which of the two cables coming from the pro 8 handle was the from omni capsule and which was the cardioid as they have no marks to show which is which. At the bottom of the pro 8 handle there is a 7 pin connector show below -

This then splits into two 3 pin XLRs (show below) and my problem was that they both looked identical. If I listened to the recordings carefully it was possible to tell which was which due to omni having more ambience and being less sensitive to things like handling and wind noise but I wanted to be totally sure.

I chatted to Richard Kemp from Telinga and he told me the best way to tell is to look at the L and R record signal strength and gently rub the foam covering around the mic. The strongest signal is from the cardioid so if you watch the level meters on your recorder while touching the foam you can tell which is which. This worked really well so I marked the cable from the cardioid capsule with some yellow tape as you can see in the initial picture.

A parabolic reflector works by gathering sound waves and making them converge on a focal point. This makes distant sound appear closer and compensates for distance. Here's an article by the technique's inventor explaining how it works [CLICK HERE]. The telinga reflector magnifies the sound around 10 times, which is very handy if you want to record a bird or a small insect in a tree above you! They are also very directional which makes them great for recording individual species isolated from the environment around them. The sound designer/recordist Tim Prebble has written a great article about his first experiences of using the Telinga on his website [CLICK HERE] .. and here's a great article about parabolic reflectors on WSRS website [CLICK HERE]. Not convinced about stereo recording with a parabola though! I would always go for mono. I will post some recordings more made with the Telinga soon.