Distant dawn chorus in Teign Gorge, from near Hunter's Gate — part 1

Pure peace! An expansive soundscape of mostly distant birdsong, after the lead-in period, during which latter the odd distant nightjar can be heard, and sometimes a tawny owl right down in the bottom of the valley. First of two parts.

This was a repeat on 23 June 2016 of my previous River Teign recordings from this spot on 19 June 2014. I wanted to capture the sound more faithfully than I could get from the PCM-M10 recorder that I used then, and on this session with a D100 instead I'd get a really lifelike panorama overlooking the river in the bottom of the valley.

Actually neither this nor the concurrent Sharp Tor recording was exactly what I was after (having been reluctant to acknowledge that Mother Nature has a habit of not repeating herself, especially when one wants her to do so.

So, in fact I have an overall slight preference for those earlier recordings — but of course the new recordings have their own plus points too, which is why I've uploaded them too. In particular, really the D100 recorder was more accurate in placement of each sound detail within the whole soundscape, with almost all the birds sounding as distant and widely dispersed as they sounded 'in the flesh'.

Advisory

Because of the very distant perspective, this is consequently a very quiet recording. If you turn up the volume you may well hear some mic self-noise, especially during the lead-in period.

This recording taking place. The recorder's tripod is perched rather precariously on a small clump of gorse, to enable it to have a clear panorama without the bracken getting in the way and losing recording definition.

From close by this recording's position (just off to right), on the occasion of my first dawn chorus recording here (on 19 June 2014). The hint of distant valley fog is in the Chagford area, while high Dartmoor forms the distant skyline.

Techie stuff:

The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields — the inner being a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and the outer a custom Windcut one —, and it was placed on a full-length Zipshot tripod.

* Note that I WARN AGAINST use of windshields that are of any sort of box shape, for I soon found that they were inherently unsuitable for any decent-quality recording. While no doubt non-box-shaped windshields from Movo would be okay, the presence of relatively flat surfaces, edges and corners creates internal narrow resonance peaks in the treble, which give the latter an abrasive and rather 'screamy' quality, no matter who's made the particular windshields. When I realized why my recordings had developed that nasty treble quality I had to go back through all recordings made with that dratted box-shaped windshield, and use Voxengo CurveEQ to enable me to precisely neutralize two narrow treble peaks and thus enable the recordings to sound wonderfully natural rather than bafflingly stressful.

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, later on, the aforementioned remedial EQ measure using Voxengo CurveEQ to remove the two narrow treble peaks kindly added by that rogue model of furry windshield.

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