Roe deer rutting calls in Teign Gorge, above Fingle Bridge

The roe deer stags are rutting, uttering their strange and sonorous challenges. The loud ones we hear, straight in front of us, are not this side of the valley at all, but quite some way away, on lower slope of the hill on the other side of the valley. Others we hear more distantly are mostly on this (south) side of the valley, but further east (downstream, on our right).

I made this recording on 22 October 2023 during the first of two ascents from Fingle Bridge to Cranbrook Castle (ancient hill fort) — over an hour from about 10.0 a.m. BST. I couldn't find any fully ideal spot to record this. As you can see from the photo, I made do with a lot of trees and bracken in the way of getting a really clear recording of the performance.

When I descended back down to Fingle Bridge the sound was very impressive — much more sonorous, and from there you could much more clearly hear other stags calling on both sides of the valley a little further downstream. However, the people noise and barking dogs down there precluded any attempt at recording that. One needed to be there midweek and not to be committed to a leg-strengthening hike with oodles of reasonably steep gradient, as I was on this occasion.

At the recording position there was a beautiful faint reverberation from each of the calls that weren't very faint / distant, but this recording seems not to have picked that up at all. I made another recording at lunchtime, with my normal wide-angle setting, and that did very slightly pick up the reverb, but it was at too low a level to be really noticed. I'm not uploading that recording because most of the distant stags appeared to have given up the contest by then, so it's less interesting even though a nice recording (after editing out a hell of a lot of disturbance!).

Related uploads to follow:

1. A version of this recording with the distant River Teign background sound reduced by 12dB, using Audacity. I'd not had great success in doing that in the past because there was noticeable degradation of the sound that I did want, but it's worked well this time, and enables one much more clearly to hear the distant stags and other details.

2. Nature-Symphony 14 (already done and queued for upload, with not a wind chime in sight). — As they say, 'Go figure!'.

This recording in progress. A deep steep-sided valley lies between here and the Prestonbury Castle hill beyond, yet the louder rutting calls we hear aren't on this side at all, but on the lower slopes of that hill.

Techie stuff
The recorder was Sony PCM-D100 with mics set to narrow angle (90°), with two nested Windcut furry windshields. It was set up on a Sirui carbon-fibre tripod.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields, and stereo widening, using the VST plugin A1 Stereo Control (135% widening), to give a moderate zoomed-in effect (effectively restoring basic soundstage coverage to my normal 120°.

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