Hum of flies in the woods — Teign Gorge on sultry June day

A beautiful and energizing sound, when you properly tune into it! — The hum of countless flies in the steep valley-slope woods of the so-called Teign Gorge (which isn't a gorge!) on a very warm and humid late June day. Various seasonal bird songs and calls are also heard, though nearly all more or less distant. A quite soporific soundscape, and thus a great sleep-assist one.

This is actually the first part of a nearly two-hour recording, which I made on 24 June 2023 in the first limb of the Lower Deer Stalker's Path, high above Fingle Bridge, Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK. I included my rather frugal lunch break in this, so as to make best use of the available time.

The whole recording was originally over two hours, but editing cut it down a bit, and I chose to split it into two for upload to Freesound.

For much of the recording there was patchy cloud. Every time the sun went in, the hum of the flies weakened and became difficult to hear (though it was still present), and then it returned within a minute of the sun coming out again. However, later in the recording the general hum level gradually lessened, despite it then becoming more sunny. As a consolation, however, for the final 50 minutes or so we had the company of a family of ravens, the calls of the young being easily distinguished from those of the adults.

That section, with reducing flies sound but the ravens and more wind in the trees than earlier, forms Part 2.

Advisory

Much more detail and overall 'presence' is heard when listening with high-grade headphones rather than speakers.

This recording in progress. This is first of three positions the recorder had during this recording, for the patches of sunshine naturally moved (towards us in this view), and indeed I was just about to move it to the second position (behind us), not only to regain the sunshine but to get an apparently stronger flies hum. And then likewise I eventually moved the recorder still further along.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested Windcut custom furry windshields, and set up on a full-size Sirui carbon-fibre tripod. It was important to have the recorder facing up-slope, even though I might have got a better flies hum by having it pointing downhill. Reason was, to take advantage of the reduced sensitivity behind the recorder, to minimize disturbance from all the people and barking dogs down in the bottom of the valley.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields, and subsequent processing with the TDR Nova GE VST plugin (my 'standard' custom wind-cut preset) to tame bits of microphone wind noise.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!