Pre-dawn to early morning birds and distant sea, Beeny Cliff (part 2)

Think of this as an 'ambience' recording rather than much of an 'attentive listen' one. A quiet and peaceful soundscape from just above the coast path above the main alcove of Beeny Cliff, near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK — the morning after the evening the guillemots and oystercatchers went absolutely crazy on 20 June 2017!

Note that I do NOT call this a 'dawn chorus'! It's a very laid-back sequence of bird sounds, of a very limited number of species, the majority more or less distant, with a very open-air acoustic, but with the constant background of the sea action on the distant cliffs extending away from Pentargon Cove towards Boscastle Harbour.

From those distant cliffs and at times from much closer, right from the beginning, still in near-darkness we hear the periodic comical 'bogeyman howls' from guillemots, and it goes on like that for a long time before the first hint of awakening of landlubber birds creeps in (a distant skylark starting up). Very gradually a few other species start performing. Very briefly, a distant blackbird. Meadow pipits strike up with their repetitive flight song.

Eventually a little flock of linnets gets flitting around and once in a while perching on the wire fence to sing their particularly sweet song for us. Another species sounds to me like a wren, except that its song never includes the little trill or burst of fast clicks that's so characteristic of the wren. I've noticed that one many times along the clifftops on my hikes, and have never been able to make out its identity.

Because of its length this recording is split into two parts. This is Part 2. — Part 1 can be found at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/683849/ .

This and the previous all-night session here (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/684824/ ) was a real curiosity experiment to see if I could get any sort of dawn chorus out here in this spectacular but rather bare situation, hopefully with booms and rumbles from the deep cave system down below. The exact position was a little above the coast path, directly up the steep grassy slope from the cliff edge in the middle of Beeny's most attention-grabbing alcove, under which said cave system runs. Depending on swell and tide conditions one can often hear here impressive beautiful deep rumbles and booms, many having a rather earthquaky feel, and indeed some being of such low frequency that one cannot hear them at all (they still show up in the waveform, though). However, during this recording, although there were some rumbles and booms, they were too small to be noticed by the ear.

This recording was made as the final fruit of that all-night session. The evening-through-dusk recordings had been ravaged by a katabatic wind that struck up at early dusk time, but the recorder position for this recording escaped the worst of the wind havoc through being well away from the Pentargon valley, into which the wind was concentrating. It did, however, still get too much wind to spare the recording I made in the middle of the night for Manx shearwaters, but after that the wind was more intermittent, with an overall decreasing trend. I was thus able to do a salvage job, having to cut out a lot of sections, including ones with particularly nice bird sound. From the original 225' (3¾ hours) I ended up with just 75', which at least was a sensible length for uploading here!

— And so, in April 2023, as I was preparing that for uploading here, and having just achieved a remarkable success in rendering usable the severely wind-ravaged part of the preceding dusk-time guillemots recording, l decided to pause preparation of this one to see if I could use the same dynamic EQ setup to rescue wind-affected parts of a copy of the archived full original. In the event, because the wind disturbance was much less than in that evening recording, nothing at all had to be cut out because of mic wind noise.

I did deliberately allow a low level of wind noise in places, so as not to make the recording sound too manicured and divorced from reality. I did, however, cut out a lot of uneventful sections, plus also, late on, an aeroplane and then a fishing boat. Nonetheless, I ended up with 144' (2h 24') of edited recording.

Looking roughly WSW from top of Beeny Cliff's main alcove from roughly where this recording was made. This photo is from a session on 2 October 2016. The recorder position this time was a little behind the camera position here, and the tripod was placed just over the fence (i.e., to our left of it), using the unofficial minor track on the other side to provide a simulation of a bit of level ground to put the tripod on (its leg lengths weren't adjustable). It was facing roughly parallel to the line of cliffs leading towards the mouth of Boscastle Harbour, so its panorama would cover the alcove just below us on the right.

Looking the other way, over the top of Beeny Cliff's main alcove — the arrow pointing to the approximate recorder position (just the other side of the fence).

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, and then (belatedly, in this new version) use of wind noise reduction in TDR Nova GE.

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