Peace on Cranbrook Down, with spring flies / bees and birds

An immersive peaceful soundscape. Not only passing flies and bees, but a continuous background hum of them, with a small isolated hawthorn tree in full blossom close-by, attracting a lot of pollinating insects. It's a perfect day, warm with unbroken sunshine and a gentle breeze (up to 3 bft), which we're sheltered from a lot of the time, though sometimes it does interfere a bit. What luxury to have an idyllic 1¾ hours' lunch and nap break on my little strenuous hike and enjoy the peace while the recorder was picking up a whole lot that I hadn't heard! Bird songs are nearly all skylark and stonechat, but a few others such as meadow pipit and a fragment of tree pipit song (both fairly distant) are in the mix, also occasionally contact calls (not song) of linnets.

I made the recording over 1¾ hours, finishing at around 1.05p.m. BST on 18 May 2025, beside the inner perimeter track of Cranbrook Castle (an ancient hill fort), on top of Cranbrook Down, high above (south of) Fingle Bridge (Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK). The exact spot was beside the east limb of the track, closely facing the aforementioned hawthorn tree, which itself was on top of the hill-fort ridge.

Advisory
This was a very quiet soundscape, and I've amplified it a fair bit to be a worthwhile experience in a more normal listening place. At the beginning you should be able to (just) hear the background hum of flies, but it soon soon gets stronger. Feel free to experiment to adjust up or down to suit your own listening conditions.

This recording running. We're looking roughly north, towards Exmoor (just lost in distant haze). The unsightly white rectangle next to the recorder is a friendly 'shush' notice for anyone passing-by.

Techie stuff:

Recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was placed on an Aoka carbon-fibre mini tripod (low, to minimize wind exposure). I had the mics set at my default wide-angle setting — 120°.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and used TDR Nova GE VST plugin to drastically reduce low bass in the microphone wind noise, so that what remains of that is generally pleasant to the ear and just a nice bit of the 'landscape'.

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