Pre-dawn to early morning birds and distant sea, Beeny Cliff (first session)

Starting with some quiet deep booms from the sea in a cave underneath us, we listen to a condensate from some four hours' recording just above the coast path above the main alcove of Beeny Cliff (near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK), capturing the sparse and peaceful pre-dawn to early morning birdsong sequence.

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.

The landlubber birds start up with a brief distant piece of skylark song. Very gradually a few other species start performing. A rather distant blackbird with rather unusual variant song. 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 and strangely human-speech-like song for us. The linnets also occasionally give us another sound: a strange metallic twangy sound caused by them perching on the barbed-wire fence, on a post of which the recorder itself was perched!

This includes the most sustained (and close-up) linnet song that I've yet captured — albeit heard through some not too bothersome microphone wind noise. 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. On the odd occasion the alarm calls of a stonechat can be made out.

This recording was part of my first all-night recording session at Beeny Cliff, on 13/14 June 2017. It 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. It suffered from extended periods of wind disturbance, so the original edited version had a lot of the birdsong cut out, including all the linnet song, and I decided not to include it in my Freesound uploads.

This is a new, remastered version, made in April 2023, with dynamic EQ applied to all sections with significant mic wind noise. That enabled me to retain all birdsong that I wanted to be in the edited version, but the downside was that almost all the cave booms were rendered inaudible.

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 Cliff'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).

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, perched on top of a fence post. 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 (on top of a fence post).

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields, placed on a GorillaPod perched on top of a fence post.

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  dynamic EQ with TDR Nova GE to strongly reduce the impact of all the mic wind noise.

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