Gentle wind gusts and family of ravens in the woods — Teign Gorge

Starting off with the hum of flies in the wood, the emphasis soon changes as the very gentle breeze picks up a bit, sending refreshing gentle gusts through the trees, and a family of ravens arrives and lingers. The calls of the young ravens are quite different from, though clearly related to, those of the parents. — A delightfully peaceful soundscape on a sultry late June middle of day.

This is actually the second 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. In the first part of the recording the hum of the woodland flies was the prime focus, but here that hum increasingly takes backstage as the breeze picks up, sending gentle gusts through the trees, and we soon have the company of a family of ravens.

Advisory

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

This recording in progress. This is the last of three positions the recorder had during the overall recording, for the patches of sunshine naturally moved (away from us in this view), and I wanted to maximize the hum of the flies.

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!