Dawn chorus, from south side of Cot Valley — higher position

Dawn chorus of distant to very distant birds, heard from a high position on the south side of the Cot Valley, with distant sea sound to left and a quietly trickling stream down in the valley bottom. For a while the murmuring of a large number of distant blackbirds all around is spellbinding.

On 24 June 2015 I made a notionally excellent dawn chorus recording from a little lower down on the highest track on the south side of the Cot Valley, near Cape Cornwall, St Just, Penwith, Cornwall, UK. One particularly outstanding feature of that soundscape was the long period in that dawn chorus when the whole countryside was alive with the murmurings of distant blackbirds. They were in absolutely every direction horizontally, not only within the valley, but also from the hilltop fields. There must have been hundreds or even thousands of them. It was absolutely breathtaking — but I realized even at the time that no straightforward stereo recorder would be able to capture all that in any convincing way.

Nonetheless, the processed, edited recording still sounded pretty fab for its blackbirds — except for a fly in the ointment, or, to put it more precisely, an effing Whitethroat, which struck up in the foreground soon after the blackbirds had really got going, and continued for about 26 minutes. For that reason I decided to have another go at a dawn chorus from about that spot, hoping that it wouldn't get vandalized by a foreground whitethroat again.

My previous upload here, then, is that recording, made on 6 June 2016, benefiting from the much better stereo imaging of a quite new Sony PCM-D100, and with no persistent foreground whitethroat. However, Mother Nature was still playing cheeky games with me, for the blackbirds in this recording are not easily noticed because of all the wrens and other shrill species. So, this recording is still a disappointment to me, albeit sounding quite lovely on its own terms.

In an attempt to get a better capture of the surrounding distant blackbirds, I also made this concurrent recording of the dawn chorus, from a fence post at the top of the valley slope, as indicated in the photos below. That was much more exposed to the wind, so that much of the recording was trashed by mic wind noise, but nonetheless I did get a good showing from the distant blackbirds, albeit nothing really like the all-round panorama that I got when standing there.

Ironically, after using the A1 Stereo Control VST plugin to improve the stereo imaging of the original PCM-M10 recording here, I warmed to that persistent whitethroat and found that really it drew attention to the blackbirds, because it directed one to listen all the more acutely to what was going on during each break between the 'verses' of its song. So I'm aiming to upload that recording too — it's a different experience, and I find it rather more interesting.

Advisory

High-grade headphones are particularly recommended in order to hear all the detail.

Photo taken on 24 June 2014 from north side of the valley, looking up and across it. Arrows show location of the two recorders used in this session. The right-hand (upper) position, way off to the right, is of this recording.

Placement of recorder for this recording, photographed the previous afternoon.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with one furry windshield — a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and it was placed on a fence post by means of a GorillaPod.

* 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 windshield — 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!