Birds' evening chorus by Bellever Tor, Dartmoor, mid-May

Spring evening birdsong low down on flank of Bellever Tor, among scattered Sitka spruce trees, with forestry plantation nearby (Bellever Forest).

This is one of four widely separated concurrent recordings that I made on the evening of 14 May 2019, sheltered from a stiff easterly breeze by self-seeded Sitka spruce trees outside the forestry perimeter on the north-west flank of Bellever Tor, near Postbridge, on Dartmoor, Devon, UK. The breeze eased off a fair bit gradually during the evening.

As I explain in detail on my page The inspiring frisson of an all-night recording session alone in the wilds, this session was a step in my series of 'rehearsal' test recordings, underscored by detailed prospecting for optimal recorder placements, which were aimed towards my doing a greatly improved version of the previous year's somewhat blighted all-night session here, again for birds' full evening and dawn choruses, including nightjar choruses and plenty of cuckoo sound.

Seeing this session in retrospective context, it's conveniently regarded as the 'dress rehearsal' for the 'final performance' that came on the night of 31 May to 1 June. However, cold conditions forced me to abandon this session as it was getting dark, so I was unable to stay for the dawn chorus.

All four recordings were made in the shelter of self-seeded Sitka spruce trees close to the forestry perimeter, on the Bellever Tor side. This recording is from the most northerly position, close to where a minor unofficial track branches off from the rough forestry perimeter track, leading SSE up to Bellever Tor summit.

As I noted in my journal, "Some cuckoos did sound during the recordings, mostly early on — but no real star performances.  I heard no blackbirds, apart from the odd distant hint of one when I was on the tor, and briefly heard a song thrush and the odd willow warbler.  No nightjars.  There seemed to be altogether too little birdsong to make worthwhile recordings."

It was therefore a great pleasure when I came to audition and edit the recordings, to find that they had each captured quite a lot of bird activity. Indeed, surprisingly, this particular recording had too much blackbird, would you believe! In particular, there was an insufferable period of some 23 minutes with this particular blackbird very close and thus uncomfortably loud, and very persistent. I rebelled and cut out 20 minutes of that, because one couldn't listen to anything much else in that time. I haven't cut that out of the original, but I did it to the copy to post here, to spare you nice listeners such purgatory — and I say that as a great lover of blackbird song generally!

Looking up the slope to Bellever Tor. This recording was made in the shelter of a group of spruces just off to the right, as indicated by the arrow, and was facing about WNW — in other words pointing very roughly in this direction. (Photos taken on 20 April 2022)

Looking north(ish) across the rough terrain that I often had to stumble across to place, inspect and retrieve recorders. The cuckoo echoes / reverberations came from the dense stand of spruces that runs round the west side of the Bellever Tor hill — a bit of which we see here on the left.

A fuller, more contextual, description of this session (as a step in my working towards a mammoth well-rehearsed all-night session), is to be found at my page The inspiring frisson of an all-night recording session out in the wilds.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two furry windshields (Windcut, custom), and it was placed on a Hama normal-size lightweight tripod.

Initial post-recording processing was to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the two furry windshields.

Please remember to give this recording a rating!