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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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

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.