Sound Recordings - 18th and 19th April

With very little time and lots of work to catch-up with between my two China trips I have not been out birding and I feel like spring in the UK is slipping me by. I have taken to carrying my sound recording kit with me when carrying out bird surveys and here are a selection of recordings from the 18th and 19th April.

I added a number of sound recordings to this post linked to uploads at the Internet Bird Collection (IBC). With the subsequent transfer of data from IBC to the Macaulay Library the links to these became broken. I have therefore subsequently uploaded these sound files to eBird and the recordings for Guildford can be viewed here and those for Dorchester can be viewed here. I have retained the sonograms from these recordings on this post.

This Blackcap near to Guildford, Surrey was energetically singing and calling with the two often mixed together. Singing from deep within a Blackthorn thicket, this was one of my first migrants of the spring. The top recording is a sequence of song while the spectrogram shows three 'tack' calls followed by a burst of song.

This Coal Tit near to Guildford, Surreywas singing emphatically from a stand of pine and came to investigate me as I wandered by. The top sonogram is a song sequence while the bottom is a burst of seven calls showing the broadband 'pit' element of the note and the near constant frequency of the 'chu' element.

This is the song of a Goldcrest near to Guildford, Surrey. The top recording is a full song sequence while the lower sonogram shows a single song sequence followed by a single call. A lot of energy goes into this seemingly simple song.

This is a Great Spotted Woodpecker drumming on a dead oak snag at the edge of its territory in an oak woodland near to Guildford, Surrey with a Blue Tit singing in the background.

This Chiffchaff near to Dorchester in Dorset was avidly defending its territory against other Chiffchaff in the area. The top recording is a long song sequence while the image below shows the structure of the notes used in the song - the 'chiff' being higher frequency with a maximum intensity at around 4.6Khz while the 'chaff' is lower at around 3.9Khz.

This male Yellowhammer near to Dorchester, Dorset was perched in a hedgerow giving an undulating call sequence rather than its classic 'little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese' song.

Pennington Marsh - 6th November

After dropping Tobias at school I paid a breif visit to Pennington Marsh mainly to see the Grey Phalarope that had been present since 26th October on Oxey Lagoon and two Cattle Egret that were found yesterday. Arriving at the car park at the bottom of Lower Pennington Lane I quickly located one of the two Cattle Egret preening on the north edge of Efford Lagoon. After a short while this single bird flew east and joined the second bird feeding around cattle on the campsite to the north of the Lower Pennington Lane carpark. I then headed to the coast hearing a Brambling fly over and a couple of Redpoll. At the coast there were good numbers of Brent Goose, Wigeon, Grey Plover, Dunlin and Knot while to sea there were 12 Great-crested Grebe and six Eider. At Oxey Lagoon the Grey Phalarope showed well in the morning sun as it fed in the western corner of the lagoon and I watched this bird for around 45 minutes. In the scrub along the edge of the lagoon were four vocal Dartford Warbler and a Firecrest - the latter is a scarce bird at Pennington.

Grey Phalarope - Oxey Lagoon, Pennington Marsh

Grey Phalarope - Oxey Lagoon, Pennington Marsh

Grey Phalarope - Oxey Lagoon, Pennington Marsh

Brent Goose - Oxey Lagoon, Pennington Marsh

Distant shot of one of the Cattle Egret - Lower Pennington Lane, Pennington Marsh

It was a beautiful still day and so I took my sound recording kit with me, here are a mixed flock of Wigeon recorded on Pennington Lagoon with the guttural female calls shown on the sonogram as vertical broadband lines and the evocative male 'wheeoo' calls shown as large inverted 'V's.

This is a recording of one of the Dartford Warbler I saw today. The recording is a substantial length of song while the sonogram shows a short sample of the same song. This was a singing male interacting with two immature birds so various calls can be heard in the recording. The sonogram conveys the scratchy sound of the song with occasional upward, downward and near constant frequency notes thrown in.

Finally, this is the Firecrest at Oxey Lagoon with various seeping calls and a single uprising contact call.

Sound Recording - Cowley Woods 1st November

I have spent many years recording and analysing bat calls as part of my work and have often considered experimenting with bird sound recording but have never done so. Having read the recent article on night sound recording in Birdwatch magazine and seeing the various samples posted on the Portland Bird Observatory website I thought I would finally give it a try. Initially I borrowed a Tascam DR05 from work but I quickly found that this recorder was not suitable (despite good reviews) for recording bird sounds. I found that the recordings were low level and that the playback on the recorder was poor, I considered that the ability to playback a recording at reasonable volume was important. After some research I opted for the Olympus LS-14 and although I tested the inbuilt microphones i found that these were not good enough for anything but the closest of birds. So I then tested a Sennheiser video-microphone that I have had for years but I couldnt get this to work. Finally after digging around I found my Sennheiser ME66 microphone which, again, I have had for many years but barely used. This was, and I believe still is, considered to be one of the best directional microphones for recording bird sounds. My research indicated that the Telinga set-up is the ultimate but this is a considerable financial outlay for one just commencing in bird sound recording.

I then investigated software for analysis of recorded bird sound and after some fairly quick research I decided that the Raven software was a good starting point. Having downloaded the free Raven Lite and watching a number of tutorial videos and reading some of the user manual I found this a fairly straightforward piece of software to get to basic grips with. I then opted to download the Raven Pro one year licence for USD100 with a view to extending this licence if my interest took off.

On 1st November I had my first opportunity to test my kit and here are a few recordings from wandering around Cowley village and to Cowley Woods near to Cheltenham. The calls were uploaded to Sound Cloud and the sonograms were generated in Raven Pro.

First I encountered a flock of Long-tailed Tit and recorded their 'zerrr' call. The sonograms generated remind me of horse heads with the higher pitched 'ze' element of the call forming the head and the lower pitched trilling 'rrr' the body of the horse.

 I then recorded this singing Robin. The recording levels are a little high and therefore there is some distortion to this recording but the sonogram shows some of the complexity of the song.

Here is a fairly distant (c.200m) Great-spotted Woodpecker showing its broadband 'pic' call.

I then encountered a flock of around 50 Redwing and in this sonogram the familiar 'seep' calls at around 7kHz and and low inverted 'V' of the 'gack' call at around 2.50 kHz at 0.4 and 2,5 seconds can be seen and heard,

Finally, at sunset this flock of House Sparrow were socialising just before settling down to roost. The sonogram is so busy that its simply fuzz from the shear level of calling by the birds.




So, I think that this is a fair start but initially I notice that there is a lot of noise to my recordings particularly in the lower frequency. I suspect this is simple background noise from the recording device as the frequency of this noise seems to be consistent across all recordings. There is a way to filter this noise in Raven Pro and I began to get to grips with this in the Robin recording, this reduced noise can be seen in the sonogram above which has a reduced fuzz along the bottom of the sonogram. During my investigations to find suitable kit to commence sound recording I found the following websites very useful and I hope they are useful for you if you decide to embark on this rapidly evolving element of birding.

Resources
ABA Blog - How to Record Birdsong Part 1
Audubon - A beginners Guide to Recording Bird Vocalisation's
Ear Birding Blog
How to Visualise Bird Sounds
Macaulay Library - Audio Recording Techniques
Raven Sound Analysis Software
Sound Approach
Understanding Sonograms
Wild Mountain Echoes