Peaceful sea at night with the 'devil bird' (1)

Bafflingly bizarre, with echoes for 'sensitive' people of tormented spirits, tortured children, demons, sorcery — whatever! — But a powerful life-affirming experience to behold if you set aside any occult or metaphysical scenarios and keep it clear in your mind that these are relatively small and vulnerable seabirds — the Manx Shearwater. I could listen for hours to this gentle sea sound here in the darkest hours of night, with these funny weirdo seabirds doing their invisible party pieces, and the odd one giving one creepy feelings as it flies, perhaps closely, directly overhead, uttering that sound… — and of course you can't even see what's doing it!

'Sane' people want to be tucked up in bed or possibly self-harming by their drinking antics during the darkest hours of the night. Everyone knows that! — However, the sanest of the lot are the ones with open, inquisitive minds, who neither self-harm with addictions, nor want always to withdraw at night into a comforting cocoon, and are prepared to come out sometimes to experience some physical challenge and stress through staying out all night and looking up at the stars and listening to — attuning to — Mother Nature and her sometimes inexplicable surprises!

This is one of two concurrent recordings I made during the early small hours of 9 June 2016, beside the coast path, which roughly contours the cliff slope to SSE of the mouth of the Cot Valley, near Cape Cornwall, St Just, Penwith, Cornwall, UK before ascending to the clifftop just beyond Carn Leskys. It was made from the nearer of the two indicated positions in the photo below. I'd been intending to record a dawn chorus too from somewhere a bit above and beyond the further position after it had become too light for the 'Manxies' to continue their little game, but it turned out to be too breezy then for more recording, so I simply sheltered, hurriedly ate my packed breakfast silly-early, walked back to St Just and hitch-hiked back to Exeter, suitably knackered!

About the 'devil bird' nickname, I caution that this can be mighty confusing, because various other countries each have their own weird-sounding bird species that has picked up that same nickname. So it needs to be clear that 'devil bird' here is to the best of my knowledge specifically a UK nickname for the Manx Shearwater.

Advisory

High-grade headphones are particularly recommended in order to hear all the detail and capture the eerie sense of movement, especially when any come at all close.

Earlier photo (24 June 2014), overlooking mouth of Cot Valley, the arrows pointing to the positions of both recorders, both beside the coast path. This recording was from the nearer position.

Mock-up the previous afternoon for this recording. In the event I placed the recorder just a little further from the sea, on that little bit of barer ground just behind it in this shot. That was to maximize shielding from the higher frequencies of the sea sound, to improve audibility of the 'Manxies'.

Techie stuff:

The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with just one furry windshield — a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and it was placed on a mini-size Zipshot tripod. This was in my early stages of trying to find a reasonably effective windshield setup for the hideously wind-sensitive on-board mics of the D100.

* 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!