Branscombe Landslip — Blackbirds sing in the calm within the wind

One of my top joyfully inspirational birdsong recordings, which always strikes gladness into my heart! A windy afternoon to early evening in Branscombe Landslip, during which the birds sing as though their lives depend on it. Blackbirds are particularly strong and inspiring performers, but also blackcap and chiffchaff come out crazy-strongly as well. — Yet amazingly I discarded all but the last hour (which latter had much lighter wind). So, what happened to enable me to rescue about half of what I'd discarded?

On 8 May 2016, in the Branscombe Landslip (near Beer, Devon, UK), I made a 3+ hours recording in the fairly low-down edge-of-woods position that I'd also used for an evening and dawn chorus recording. The wind was a generally strong south-easterly (force 6 Bft), though backing to north-easterly later on, and this spot quite well down in the landslip was sheltered to a large extent, though with a fair number of gusts of lesser strength coming around from time to time. I was in the early stages of testing-out my new Sony PCM-D100 recorder.

As the wind backed, it became more sheltered down here and mostly nearly calm, though still with a mostly distant background sound of the wind in the more exposed thickets and trees, which masked the very quiet sea sound that you would otherwise hear from here.

The recording, after a huge editing task, was thrilling, but extreme wind sensitivity of the recorder mics, combined with an actual fault that caused nearly all the microphone wind noise to be coming from the right, proved tiresome, and so eventually I chose to discard most of that recording and salvage just the serene final third (finishing at about 7.0 p.m.), editing out a relatively small number of further intrusions of microphone wind noise. Even this much more sheltered period still had an exhilarating background sound of the constant wind in distant trees and thickets all around.

What we were then left with was a laid-back sequence of birdsong, with a lot of space for the songs to 'breathe'. I issued that as an excellent 70-minute Download — but in 2019 I came across a dynamic EQ VST plugin program called TDR Nova GE, which enabled me to go back to the original unedited version of the recording and greatly reduce the bass frequencies of the microphone wind noise. This then still required a huge editing task (a plethora of people disturbances to cut out as well as plenty of still-too-intrusive mic wind noise), but it was still worth it, I now having salvaged a fair amount of the really windy conditions and some of the particularly strong and evocative close-by blackbird singing right in the midst of the windy pandemonium, resulting in my having gained an approximate doubling of the overall edited recording length.

As already remarked, blackbirds are the overall star performer, giving us some beautiful close solos, but also at times with other blackbirds at varying distances all joining in. From here, most of the louder birds become more reverberant with increasing distance, so giving us a great sense of space, depth, and general perspective. Other birds that make themselves apparent include blackcap, chiffchaff, wren, goldfinch, chaffinch and blue tit, the first two putting on a wonderfully strong performance at times, vying with the blackbirds for 'star performer' awards.

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 a later recording from the same spot. The furry windshield used for this recording was black, and without a rigid shape. I had to trample down a bit of a dense nettle bed to enable me to record from this spot. 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 Røde DeadKitten of the newer, less effective version, and it was placed on a full-length Zipshot tripod. I was in the process of discovering to my horror just how wind-sensitive the D100's mics were, and how ineffective were even the supposed best of the furry windshields sold for that model.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield — and then, later on, the aforementioned salvage work using TDR Nova GE to severely cut down the low frequencies of the mic wind noise.

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