dawn chorus — Field Recording Blog

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.

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.