Branscombe Landslip — evening spring birdsong: part 1

As part of an all-night session in Branscombe Landslip (Beer, Devon, UK) aimed primarily at capturing a dawn chorus, I captured this exquisite evening birdsong sequence. When you listen really carefully you realize that the apparent gaps in the performance are gaps only in nearby activity, and that there are always birds still singing at a greater or still greater distance. That big dynamic range gives a breathtaking sense of spaciousness and purity of the air. It's as though a lot of the time we're not just listening to the birds singing, but to the gaps between the sounds. Refreshing and immeasurably peaceful!

I made this recording on 28 May 2016, from about 6.0 to 8.30 p.m., as usual having to cut out some sections, most notably one long section that was trashed by a group of noisy and anti-social youngish people who got through the clifftop wire fence and were making a lot of very loud noise from a little grassy clifftop platform there, before they eventually lost interest and took their noise-making elsewhere, thank Mickey Mouse!

After editing, there was still close to two hours of really clean recording. I've split it into two parts, and this is the first. The second is at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/688908/ .

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 the 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 one furry windshield — a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, 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 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!