Branscombe Landslip — birdsong on a windy May afternoon

Now that the trees here in Branscombe Landslip (Beer, Devon, UK) have their soft new greenery, the sound of the gusts is softened, and the birds are celebrating the spring with their songs. Particularly prominent are song thrush, blackcap and wren, with blackbirds mostly singing later on and more distantly.

On 14 May 2017 I made a 3+ hours recording in the fairly low-down edge-of-woods position that I'd also used previously for evening and dawn chorus recordings.

This was actually an attempt to redo a thrilling long recording from this very same spot, which I'd made on 8 May 2016, when I'd had inadequate wind protection for the mics of my then new Sony PCM-D100 recorder, and I'd felt obliged to discard the major and most thrilling part (the first two of three hours), in which the wind had had a wilder and more incisively gusty quality, and blackbirds had sung close and loud through all the wind turmoil.

However, early in 2023 I remastered that recording from the archived original (an editing feat surely achievable only by the insane because of all the disturbances, including lots of yacking walkers and of course barking dogs!), including the use of dynamic parametric EQ to greatly reduce the mic wind noise, and salvaged almost an hour out of the wild two hours with really vivid blackbird performance. So, my rescue-augmented version of that will appear here on Freesound in due course.

I have to admit, then, that although this recording is quite lovely, I felt disappointed by it after that more punchy and blackbirdy one from the previous year.

For this recording, then, it was a quite windy afternoon, with a 'strong' (force 6 Bft) wind blowing up through the landslip from the west. Notionally this was a very poor wind direction for having the recorder sufficiently sheltered, but in practice the lie of the land made this still a relatively sheltered spot, with wind gusts constantly coming around and making a commotion in the surrounding trees and thickets. However, because the trees had now got their fresh foliage, the wind sound in them was softened, so taming the turbulent, and frisky sort of sound that I'd have preferred here.

Fortunately my new windshield arrangement this time, of two 'nested' custom Windcut furry windshields, provided excellent protection considering the basic extreme wind sensitivity of the Sony PCM-D100 recorder's microphones, so that I needed to cut out only a small number of very transient mic noise peaks, and even those were only mildly intrusive and not overwhelming as I'd expected.

The wind sound is constant, albeit with fluctuations and the superimposed sound of individual gusts moving about in the trees around us — though actually part of what seems to be the wind background sound is actually the sea (left of centre), which has got relatively noisy. That would be making nice echoes and reverberations on the towering cliff, but the nearer wind noise is masking all that. The birds sing well, with a lot of prominent song thrush performance, and presently extended ensembles of blackbirds, on this occasion mostly more or less distant. Blackcap, chiffchaff, robin, wren and goldfinch join in at times.

I'm presenting here the first hour of this recording.

Advisory
This really comes to life, and reveals masses of further detail, when listened to with high-grade headphones rather than speakers.

Looking back eastwards over Landslip, with arrow showing the exact recorder position (May 2018 photo) beside the coast path; you can see the small hawthorn tree in front of the recorder (see below) quite distinctly, thanks to its shadow. At this scale one can't see the thick bed of stinging nettles bordering the coast path on the recorder side!

Making this recording. I had to trample down a bit of a dense nettle bed to do this. I was bare-legged, but managed to keep stings to a just a few minor ones.

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

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields, and, more recently TDR Nova GE to apply dynamic EQ to reduce the stronger peaks of microphone wind noise.

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