Curlews, Greylags and other waders on a Suffolk, UK, estuary

Unknown album (26/05/2023 17:49:52)

Suffolk Estuary

Mosquitoes celebrating Swedish national day 230606

Immagina di trovarti in un luogo arido, circondato da distese di  cespugli secchi. Il fruscio del vento ti avvolge, portando con sé il suono delicato delle foglie che si muovono. In lontananza, puoi percepire un basso rumore, come se la terra stessa stesse sussurrando i suoi segreti. Questi sono i suoni che un field recordist può catturare, portando con sé l'essenza di questi ambienti aridi e trasportandoti in luoghi lontani."
Poi arriva la pioggia... Tutto cambia!

Imagine that you are in an arid place, surrounded by dry bushes. The rustle of the wind envelops you, bringing with it the delicate sound of moving leaves. In the distance, you can hear a low noise, as if the earth itself is whispering its secrets, carrying the essence of these arid environments with it and transporting you to distant places."
Then the rain comes and everything changes…

nature sound

Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii = "Harris's flesh-lover"). In Palawa Kani, 'Purinina'.* Recorded respectfully on the land of the Tommeginne people.

This is a brief excerpt from a recording made during the night while my daughter and I stayed in a log cabin at Mountain Valley retreat in Loongana, northwestern Tasmania.** We were very fortunate to be the only guests staying there at the time. As he always does for his guests, in the early evening, our kind and knowledgeable host, Len, produced some road-kill collected earlier from a local road - in this case, a large wombat carcase (seen in the right panel of the track photo) - tying it and pegging it directly in front of our cabin verandah, in anticipation of Tasmanian Devils visiting during the night to feed on the fresh carcase.

Len attached a night vision camera to a verandah post (sample images seen in the left panel of the track photo), and I set up a pair of Sennheiser MKH 8060 supercardioids at the edge of the verandah, less than a couple of metres away from the carcase, with Mogami cables passing through the window to a MixPre-6 II inside the cabin, recording at 96 kHz and 32 bit float. This is a sample extract of what happened during the night.

The night was perfectly still and calm, not the slightest breath of a breeze, and the sky was perfectly clear. The temperature fell well below 0° C soon after midnight. Before dawn, a lovely dense mist filled the landscape.

In the first minute of the recording, you will hear a Ringtail Possum feeding on the meat. At 1:10, the Possum suddenly scurries hurriedly up into a nearby tree, as a Tasmanian Devil approaches, and soon begins munching on flesh and crushing bones with its powerful jaws.

You may wonder about the source of the persistent background 'white noise' in this recording. It is the sound of the flowing River Leven, emanating and filling the whole valley. It is an ever-present sound, and it is especially clear when the air is calm and still. It is a natural reality.
. . . . . . .

What killed the wombat on the road at night? I think it highly unlikely to have been a tourist campervan, or even a local's 4WD. A wombat is a large animal and easy to see from a distance. My guess is a log truck. They work 24/7, run on a tight schedule, and drive as fast as they can manage on winding roads - especially after having unloaded, and are rushing back to the logging coupe for the next load. Sudden swerving at high speed to avoid an animal on the road is extremely dangerous for any vehicle, let alone for a large logging truck. Besides, a large wombat, or even a large Forester Kangaroo, is hardly going to leave the slightest dent in the front end of a logging truck.

Len collected the roadkill and deliberately set it out on his wilderness property for the purpose of attracting and feeding Tasmanian Devils living in the area, for the sake of providing a unique and illuminating experience to his visitors. (It also gets the roadkill far away from the road, where it would endanger more animals that would come to feed on it.) In this respect, I consider him to be a conscientious educator. I do not consider this act to be a distortion of nature, by any means; whereas, I do very much consider the continued logging of old growth native forest (which is still happening today, right now***) to be a fundamentally unethical and ecologically consequential abuse of nature. A final line needs to be drawn, in perpetuity.

_____________________________
* See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_devil and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palawa_kani

** https://www.mountainvalley.com.au/

*** See, e.g.,https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/30/tree-hobart-cbd-native-forest-logging-reform-tasmania and https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/30/the-massacre-of-tasmanias-forests-could-be-stopped-at-any-time-where-are-australias-leaders.

2023.09.12 Tasmanian Devil (Purinina) Excerpt. Early Spring.

When it comes to recording, 2023 was an odd season, my trip to Sweden was not successful from a recording point of view, then at home I have two main recording locations, Ballinvally and Rosahane Graveyard, for various reasons the recording in Ballinvally was not very successful, however the trips up to the graveyard were much better and I am very pleased with those recordings.  I love the purity of the silence there, the birds even seem to sing more beautifully in the uplands for some reason.  Maybe it has something to do with the air being more thin at altitude.   All these sounds were recorded with Lewitt 440's and usually a Sound Devices MixPre3 recorder.

The Uplands - Morning (1).

This longish recording focusses on First Light rather than Dawn (Second Light and Sunrise), although it includes the beginnings of the latter. It ought to be listened to with good quality headphones, or good quality speakers, at a mid-range volume of around fifty to sixty per cent. The recording is unedited: one of the things that particularly interests me, and that I especially enjoy, about this early spring First Light forest soundscape (and other similar early spring forest Dawn recordings that I made during this road trip to Tasmania) is precisely its very gradual, slow, minimal, and spacious development. This sounds nothing like an overly-busy tropical rainforest. The 'silence' never completely disappears.

In this rich, dense, moist, cool-temperature southern forest of Tasmania, at the time that this excerpt begins, it is still fairly dark to the human eye. The first First Light call is (as usual) from a Black Currawong (Strepera fuliginosa), a species of Currawong that is found only in Tasmania. Its call is quite unique, very unlike any mainland Currawong, and I grew to adore it, and to recognise it as the main Tasmanian forest sentinel of dawn.

We also hear the final few night calls of Ninox novaeseelandiae leucopsis, which I would prefer to refer to as the 'Tasmanian Boobook', rather than its more common and familiar name, 'Morepork'. Both names are, of course, onomatopoeic labels provided by Europeans. But the name 'Morepork' suggests, to me, an image of radically displaced Europeans in an unfamiliar landscape, craving pork meat, and hearing this beautiful owl call as though it were expressing their own cravings: 'More pork!" (Interestingly, DNA evidence has suggested that Ninox novaeseelandiae is more closely related to the New Zealand Boobook (also commonly known in NZ as the 'Morepork') than to the mainland Southern Boobook (Ninox boobook).)

The other early caller, here, is the Yellow Wattlebird (Anthocaera paradoxa), also found only in Tasmania.

Gradually, the 'Dawn Chorus' stirs and unfurls into a more richly-populated wakefulness. Thankfully, the introduced and now feral Superb Lyrebirds, which have seriously infested this region, seem to be late risers that enjoy sleeping in: somewhat later in the original recording, they pretty much take over most of the forest soundscape.

Recorded with meditative respect upon the land of the Nuenonne tribe of the Palawa people. The recording was made with a pair of MKH 8040s in ORTF into an F3 recorder.

2023.09.23 First Light. Huon Valley. Early Spring.

Here is a track I should have posted last year.  It is an experimental recording I made near Dalsvallan (Near Sveg) Sweden.  I had the new Lewitt 440 Pure microphones and I wanted to see how far I could push the gain before noise became noticeable as they have a noise level of 7db.  The sound of the breeze in the treetops somewhat masks the mic/amp noise, however the gain on the MixPre3 was at the very high level of 74db, still the quality is really good.  Where I recorded this is nearer the mountain than in the picture but will give you an idea of what the area was like.  You might just make out a house just below the middle of the picture, this is the area where I stayed for three weeks.  Recording 3986.

Forest atmosphere & wind - 7th of May 2023 at 4.51pm, Dalsvallan

The long-eared owl is not a very nice bird to listen to, but I have two reasons for this upload: A friend of mine said that this was the only long-eared owl he had ever heard together with the echo. The other reason is sentimental; this was a time when one could get the morning paper into one´s mailbox...
Telinga EM23 and Sony PCM D-50 in May 12 2014, no filtering done.

Long-Eared Owl Drama

Frogs in the first weeks of activity of the year. It was the warmest night so far, unusually high and although I went to the lake's edge, they were so loud that they could be heard from a long distance. This is also a place to see and hear herons and sometime storks, but this night it was all for the frogs.
I was testing out a Zoom F3 for the second time.

Frogs in the Countryside

Did an experiment placing two stereo-mounted Primo EM172 capsules on the opposite sides of a tree trunk, connected to a Sony PCM M-10 recorder to capture the sound of Arctic Loon at a lake side not far from my home during a night with very little wind. Gain was set to high, level 5. 

I got almost ten hours of continuous recording. It was interesting and a bit saddening to learn how the strong the noise from human activity was even in the middle of the night. Airplanes were flying over, and in the first part one can clearly hear the voices of a party at a firewood some km:s away. The wind picked up from 3 AM and out competed the sound of the loons.

I like the Primo capsules a lot, but in almost complete silent environments like this they fall short in terms of noise. But upgrading to something better will cost a lot more money…

I compiled two sessions of loon sounds in this track. A +8 dB noise reduction, 6 dB amplification and a 100 Hz high pass filter were applied in post.

Loon night

Large pig frogs lead the croaking chorus of multiple species searching for mates in the flooded saw grass prairie along PaHaOkee Road in Everglades National Park, Florida. Southern cricket frogs "clack-clack" in background.Wide stereo field recorded in ORTF with pair of Line Audio CM3 cardioid microphones feeding a Sound Devices MixPre 3 recorder. February 2018.

Loon night

Lars Edenius

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