Birds' dawn chorus on west flank of Bellever Tor, Dartmoor

Full dawn chorus (pre-dawn to early morning) in position sheltered by self-seeded Sitka spruce trees a little outside forestry periphery, west of the tor, facing NNE. Cuckoos periodically echoing / reverberating in the dense stands of the spruces not far off, and we're treated to a half-hour quiet nightjar chorus plus a lone melancholy-sounding distant cuckoo leading us in ever so gradually…

Caution! The opening is very quiet. If you turn up the volume to anything more than a level that would give a good rendition of normal symphonic orchestral music, some of the later birdsong will be uncomfortably loud. Also, please note that, like any full dawn chorus, it's very much for those people with long attention span — especially during the first half-hour, by which time the unfolding of the chorus is noticeably accelerating.

This is one of four widely separated concurrent recordings that I made during the pre-dawn to early morning period on 1 June 2019, sheltered from an initially moderate but decreasing south-westerly breeze by self-seeded Sitka spruce trees outside the forestry perimeter on the west flank of Bellever Tor, near Postbridge, on Dartmoor, Devon, UK.

As I explain in detail on my page The inspiring frisson of an all-night recording session alone in the wilds, this session was the all-night 'final performance' — the culmination of my series of test and then 'rehearsal' recordings, which was 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.

Whereas in the 'dress rehearsal' for this session (evening / dusk, 14 May) all four recorders had been placed around the west / north-west flank of Bellever Tor, this time I wanted to increase their scope, so only two recorders were placed there, the other two being placed further north, more away from the tor, both just inside the edge of regrowing forestry. Ideally they'd have been just outside, in the clearing that runs very roughly northwards from Bellever Tor (particularly to capture nightjars, and, hopefully, skylarks), but there were no self-seeded Sitka spruce trees there to shelter the recorders, so I placed them as close to the main clearing as possible.

This recording is from my recorder labelled R6, at the most southerly position used in this session. I left it and the others running all night, to ensure that nothing important would be missed. Nightjars and cuckoos don't have much of an 'off' period in the short nights of this time of year, and there might always be something unexpected of interest in the middle of the night.

In the event, although the nightjars gave only a late and sparse performance for the recorders in the evening part of the session, they did much better for the pre-dawn into dawn period. This recording gets a pretty good showing of that, especially considering the constraints imposed by having to have the recorder sheltered from the breeze. This is a beautifully atmospheric effect, especially with the punctuations from occasional cuckoo episodes. Those cuckoos echo / reverberate really nicely in the dense stand of forestry to west (on the left round to rather behind).

However, there is a disappointment, in that the nightjars, apart from a single one that gave a performance near the recorder, are all sufficiently distant that they're difficult to hear from really good speakers, even though I can hear them quite distinctly (albeit mostly very quiet) on my Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones. If you want to hear a more distinct nightjar chorus, the best place I can offer currently is the concurrent recording by R4 in that session.

Also, later in the recording certain birds, especially willow warbler, sang a bit too close, and that forced me to reduce their level somewhat for tolerably comfortable listening. That processing in turn causes a slight dip in the background sound during those brief reduced peaks.

The recorder for this recording, already set up and recording during the previous evening, to run continuously till early morning packing-up time. The black furry windshield can just be made out, and below it the light speck is the high-vis / reflective strip around the top of the tripod.
There are more gaps between the trees than is evident in this view. The recorder is facing the quite wide gap between the trees on left and the left-most of the trees behind, and it has an open wide panorama to west — i.e., in this direction, towards the stand of forestry that gives us the echoes / reverbs from the cuckoos and indeed occasionally cattle. Those effects would thus all be heard on the left side of the recording.

Looking roughly NNW from Bellever Tor, pointing out recorder placements for this all-night session, towards the end of the session early the morning. R4 is the furthest, with R5 and R6 off to left — the latter being the furthest south.

A fuller, more contextual, description of this session (as the culmination of a sequence of prospecting and rehearsal sessions, to greatly improve on the previous year's blighted all-night session here), 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, unusually with just one furry windshield (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 furry windshield, and the dynamic compressor VST plugin TDR Kotelnikov to reduce the level of some over-obliging birds that came to sing too close to the recorder — always a hazard when one relies on trees to give shelter to the recorder!

Although I consistently failed get acceptable results with Kotelnikov or indeed other compressors for dealing with lightning strikes or firework displays (transient weird balance where a sudden loud sound is tamed), I find the results with over-loud birds relatively effective and transparent, though where there is noticeable continuous background sound I do notice a gentle dip in that sound coinciding with the reduced peaks, which isn't at all ideal but at least is better than having those birds so disproportionately and uncomfortably loud.

Please remember to give this recording a rating!