Yellowhammer Dialects

---

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.

---

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

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.