Capercaillie Morning 230422

Normalised to -1.00 dB. No other processing, no editing.

(Alternative version: https://soundcloud.com/hearingbeings/20230319-night-pasture-with-sheep-and-freight-train-early-autumn)

2023.03.19 Night with Sheep and Freight Train

Between the solo flying display of a Pilatus PC-21 and the aerial handling display of a F-35A Lightning II, there was an interval of three hours, during which time I kept recording. Throughout those three hours, three civilian helicopters, one after the other, were repeatedly taking off, departing, returning, and landing again, in a continuous cycle. They were taking customers on brief scenic flights over the racetrack and surrounding city and parks, and would often pass directly overhead after taking off, or when coming back in to land. This recording is just one third of the three hour recording. It is unedited.

Available at: https://hearingbeings.bandcamp.com/track/helicopter-meditation
Related: https://soundcloud.com/hearingbeings/sets/2023-11-26-f-35a-lightning-ii

Recorded respectfully on the land of the indigenous Kaurna people.

@Bandcamp

2023.11.26 Helicopter Meditation.

No processing, no effects. Just mixing between parallel simultaneous raw recordings.

A car passes over the overhead bridge. The freight train passes over the farther bridge. We hear the freight train first through the air, and then purely through the resonating steel skeleton of the nearer bridge.

2024.03.01 Listening through the Bridge.

Crow Nesting Colony

An excerpt from an attended dawn recording, sitting within a Sheoak grove, featuring a pair of Australian Ravens. There can be little doubt that the Raven has one of the most penetrating and far-reaching unbeautiful yet evocative and expressive voices of the Australian bush. An intriguing being.

This recording was made with a pair of large-diaphragm condenser omnidirectional microphones in AB array with 62 cm spacing, raised high on a lightweight lighting stand, in a different location from, but contemporaneously with, and in the same locality as, the following related recordings, which were made with an unattended rig:
https://soundcloud.com/hearingbeings/20240811-grey-shrike-thrush-with-crested-bellbird-winters-end
https://soundcloud.com/hearingbeings/20240811-gilberts-whistler-at-dawn-winters-end

Recorded respectfully and mindfully upon the land of the Meru and Danggali people.

Track image credit: JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

2024.08.11 Pronouncements of Ravens at Dawn. Winter's End.

September dawn morning, two squirrels chase each other along a pine trunk, blackbirds, song thrushes, dunnocks and robins take a morning bath in the forest pond. Subdued calls until a blackbird suddenly burst into song for a few seconds.

Nåsten, Uppsala. September 22, 2024.
Zoom F3 + 2 x Clippy EM272

Squirrels chasing each other along a pine trunk

My new album of birdsong recordings from Palupohja in the Alam Pedja reserve Estonia.  Spring 2024.  

4PalupohjaSpring2024

2025.03.27 Train of Thoughtlessness

Atlantic Grey Seals (Halichoerus grypus) at Donna Nook National Nature Reserve, Lincolnshire. 

http://www.lincstrust.org.uk/donna-nook

With hundreds of cows and pups only a few metres away from the coastal path it was possible to record at levels that helped reduce the roar of surf and unwanted noises from shipping. 

Recorded at 1am on the 7th December 2015 with a pair of MKH40’s arranged ORTF into a SD MixPre and 702.


Seal Sounds at Donna Nook

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park lies in southwestern Uganda on the edge of the Rift Valley and is home to an estimated 320 mountain gorillas – roughly half of the world’s population, including several habituated groups, which can be tracked. 

During my time observing the mountain gorillas we spent around 1 hour in the company of the Oruzogo group, led by Bakwate the dominant alpha Silver back.

Mountain gorillas are 99% vegetarian with their diet mainly consisting of fruits, leaves, bark and soft stems. The remaining 1% is for ants, which they often find on the underside of tree bark. With this type of diet, they are extremely flatulent. In this recording, you can listen to a number of farts I recorded as we observed the group.

Photo courtesy of Anne Zak (http://www.annezakrzewski.de/)

Crow Nesting Colony

Seb Rau