Guillemot paradise! — Pentargon Cove, near Boscastle (part 2 of 2)

The evening the guillemots and oystercatchers went crazy — hilarious and thrilling!

Late evening and dusk grandstand panorama of sea action on the cliffs on the other side of Pentargon Cove and towards Boscastle Harbour, with periodic outbursts of the raucous 'bogeyman howls' and 'Punch-and-Judy laughter' of guillemots over on that side, which could be mistaken by superstitious people as coming from evil spirits or witches if the birds aren't seen.

For some reason the guillemots and eventually oystercatchers are much more excitable this time than I've known before or since. That leads into an amazing crazed orgy of sound from the guillemots and oystercatchers during the dusk period — just as a stiff katabatic wind set up and trashed that part of the recording!

This is Part 2 of the recording (Part 1 is at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/683589/ ). It's the tolerably un-trashed final section, when dusk progressively transformed into nearly dark, while the birds went crazy and the katabatic wind set in.

This session nearly didn't happen at all, because 20 June 2017 was wiltingly hot and humid, and for that reason I hadn't been intending to have an outing at all that day. But then after breakfast I got restless and thought it could perhaps be workable to go out for an all-night recording session, with not too much walking involved, and I settled on seeing if I could get some semblance of dawn chorus, and also, in the darkest hours, maybe some Manx shearwaters (bizarrely eerie), and during that afternoon / evening I could aim for a better recording of the guillemots over the other side of Pentargon Cove than I'd obtained so far.

I therefore hitch-hiked out to Boscastle (Cornwall, UK), arriving late morning, but delaying my going to my recording locations on various parts of Beeny Cliff till evening (some very strenuous bits on the route).

This time the guillemots' insane bedlams of 'bogeyman howls' and stilted 'Punch-and-Judy laughter', mostly from one particular two-entrance cave the other side of Pentargon Cove, were more frequent and loud than I'd heard before, frequently setting me off into giggles. There was a sense of intensity about the guillemots' sound, particularly as they were uttering the grating 'bogeyman howls' and not much of the 'laughter'. My throat got to feeling a tad sore in empathy with those funny little guys and gals out there in the cave and on the cliffs there, making all those loud grating throaty noises, over and over!

They became spectacularly wild and persistent as dusk came on, also with a host of oystercatchers then joining in the fun with their persistent noisy flyabouts. Other birds heard include herring gull, rock pipit, wren, dunnock.

Frustratingly, roughly the final half-hour, when all the most crazy performance was running, was just a mass of mic wind noise. It wasn't till I was about to prepare this recording for Freesound upload that I finally did manage to make the real performance (sort-of) audible through the mic wind noise, thanks to using a custom preset with some extreme settings in TDR Nova GE.

That mic wind noise, even after all that reduction, is still a fair assault on the ears, but at least with all the editing I have arrived at giving some reasonable idea of the thrill and hilarity of that situation and the crazy performance I was listening to. Take the wind noise here as part of the authenticity of a real live experience, rather than as being a blight!

This recording taking place. This placement was actually far from ideal, albeit with good intention. I'd positioned it, on a low tripod, in such a way as to shelter it somewhat from sound from sea action over the other side of the cove, so the guillemots could be heard more clearly — but actually that also rather attenuated the guillemots' performance. Indeed, I myself heard the whole show MUCH more clearly (and was in fits of giggles) just a little down the grassy slope on left — and that's really where the recorder needed to have been too, and it would have been a little less exposed to the the katabatic wind once it started up.

From slightly lower, on the grassy slope, a 2021 telephoto shot of guillemots high up on the column separating the two entrances of the big cave (centre, in top photo) the other side of the cove.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two 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. Part 2 additionally had some extreme dynamic EQ from TDR Nova GE to reduce the intense mic wind noise to a sort-of manageable level.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!