Dawn chorus, from south side of Cot Valley — first recording

How an annoying foreground whitethroat (or pair of them) actually improved the effect of the huge multitude of distant blackbirds, as the whole valley and the surrounding hilltop fields came to be murmuring with them!

Dawn chorus in the Cot Valley (near Cape Cornwall, St Just, Penwith, Cornwall, UK), from the south side, on the highest track, a little way inland, fairly well down the track where it's descending inland towards the little valley-bottom road, but still well out in the open. The recorder faces across the valley, having a more or less distant but very, very expansive perspective on the valley's dawn chorus, with the sea in Porth Nanven clearly audible to the left (except that, as explained in Techie stuff below, you will hear it perversely somewhere in the middle!).

Unusually in my experience, blackbirds started off at kick-off time, instead of waiting another half-hour before coming in. And they give us a great treat, albeit at a moderate to mostly great distance. The tentative beginning of the chorus soon expanded so that I was hearing a continuous murmuring of distant blackbirds in all directions, including not only the valley bottom and slopes but also the fields on the high ground either side of the valley — though of course the ordinary stereo recording couldn't capture even half of the detail and sheer magnificence of the blackbird chorus that I heard there.

One little 'unfortunately' is that the bird that kindly came to sing in the foreground then wasn't a blackbird (which latter was what I so much wanted!), but a cantankerous, scratchy-sounding Whitethroat. That wouldn't have mattered in moderation, as the blackbirds are still easily heard between the whitethroat's short phrases, but it went on and on, with some partial lapses, for some 26 minutes before standing down to let others have their say without interruption! Other birds heard include song thrush, wren, robin, chaffinch, chiffchaff, goldfinch, dunnock (I think), woodpigeon, the inevitable carrion crow, and a transient teasing hint of a chough.

On subsequent listenings to this recording, however, I've warmed to it, not finding the whitethroat anything like so tiresome, and generally being better able to hear the blackbirds and other bird sounds in the background. This is now greatly helped by the stereo enhancement applied in 2019/20,which makes for a really wide and much more sharply detailed three-dimensional soundstage.

The edited recording starts at about 4.20 a.m. BST, giving just a little pre-dawn-chorus lead-in time

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. Arrow shows location of the recorder for this recording.

This recording taking place; the arrow points to it; its light grey furry windshield is just visible at the point of the arrow.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-M10, with just one furry windshield — a Røde DeadKitten (original, more effective, version).

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and more recent processing with the A1 Stereo Control VST plugin (200% widening).

The latter has greatly expanded and sharpened-up the soundstage, but that sort of processing of the M10's poor stereo imaging does have a cost, in that sounds that were really strongly left or right, or indeed a bit further round still (in other words rather behind) get repositioned to somewhere in the middle. A case in point here is the sea sound, which was coming clearly from the left. That processing has moved it to the central region — indeed sounding to me a little right of centre. Nonsensical! — Similarly, all the birds that were heard fully on one side or the other are piled together somewhere more or less in the middle. Amazing, then, that the recording sounds so good despite all those brazen inaccuracies of positioning!

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