Branscombe Landslip magic! Spring birdsong with sea echoes on cliff

Magical combination of birdsong and sea sound with a difference!

This is in the lower, western, end of Branscombe Landslip, Beer, Devon, UK on 18 April 2018. The sea here has a special sound because the beaches around here are pebbles rather than sand or rocks, and this echoes on Hooken Cliff, which towers above the landslip. With rather unusually chunky waves for here, we can even hear a slight thundering quality in the waves' sound, which I hadn't noticed here before — and the blackbirds had gone mysteriously weird for this recording session, as I'll explain further below…

One of two concurrent recordings from different viewpoints. It was the lower and more westerly of the two, perched on a very low branch, and facing north-east. Here the direct sea sound is at hard-left and behind. Anything heard to right of that is echoes off the cliff.

This was a serendipitous find, because what I was really after was a recording made just a little higher up in the landslip, with a strong south-east wind roaring around through the trees while blackbirds and others sing through it all — in other words a repeat of what I'd attempted recording there on 8 May 2016.

At that time I'd had minimal wind protection for the new D100 recorder's microphones, and I'd had to discard the main, wild and dramatic, part of that recording (but much more recently I was able to do a remarkable salvage job on it). — But now, using three furry windshields on each recorder, I reckoned that I was in for a chance of getting something usable from such wild conditions if I got them again there.
(Little did I understand then what a problem I was bringing myself through getting using a third 'furry'!)

In the event the wind wasn't strong enough, and in any case turned out to be from the east, so sheltering much of the landslip from anything more than the odd quite gentle gusts. So, my one aim for that outing was unachievable. However, the waves were actually larger and more clearly separated than on any of my previous recording days there, so I made for the bottom end to get a better recording than previously of the breaking waves on the shingle beach echoing on the cliff towering above. This worked out truly brilliantly, with not only clear echoes on the cliff, but chunky-enough waves to produce significant thundering sound at times, together with a lot of birdsong.

Mother Nature also presented me with a bonus extra, in that much of the blackbird song that I got in this day's recordings was really weird — unlike any of that species (or indeed any species) I'd heard before. The voice was clearly blackbird, but the phrases and mode of singing them was anything but! A lot of the time it was just two very simple phrases, each sung in a most atypical deadpan, out-of-tune way, as though bored or taking the mickey out of something or somebody (presumably me!), and probably depressed and a bit drunk for good measure! Not kidding! Absolutely, absolutely weird.

I got into correspondence with the experienced bird recordist Geoff Sample about this. He had some relevant ideas, though for the time being a particularly open mind is necessary about what was going on there, and why I'd never heard that weird sort of blackbird song before in that location — even just the previous year.

Prominent birds include blackcap, chaffinch, goldfinch, chiffchaff, wren, and in the background there are sometimes distant cluckings / cacklings from fulmars perched high up on the cliff, and you'll hear the odd calls from ravens as they glide around. Although blackbirds do sing, not only is their song weird, but they don't achieve any real prominence in the proceedings — which latter point is unusual at this time of year.

Advisory
To get anything really like the real life experience one needs to listen to this with high-grade headphones.

This recording taking place. Recorder in shade on left, facing the cliff a little off to the right of this view. The direct sea sound (what there is of it) is hard-left of and somewhat behind the recorder, so most of the sea sound we hear is echoes off the cliff. The fulmars are high up on the cliff we can see, not further right.

From just a little higher on the coast path, we see the cliff towering up above us, and hear the sea echoes moving from left to right across it (best noticed in high-grade headphones).

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with three nested custom Windcut furry windshields, placed on a 'mini'-size Zipshot tripod.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields and correction for the D100's weakness in very low bass.

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