Peace on Cranbrook Down, with flies, bees, birds, grasshoppers (1)

(Part 1 of 2)
Yet another immersive peaceful soundscape, quite near the location of my previous 'straight' natural soundscape uploaded here (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/808033/ ). This is in an unbroken sunshine June heatwave, with day maximum hitting around 26° in this area, with not only a lot of flies and bees activity, including bumblebees, but also periodic grasshoppers adding interest for those whose HF hearing is good enough for one to hear them (I myself mostly can't nowadays, but just see them on the waveform). We also get periodic contact calls and occasional song fragments from linnets, with very occasional other birds, mostly distant, including skylark and meadow pipit.

Part 2 is at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/812802/ .

This is probably the least wind-affected so far of all my Cranbrook Down recordings, and, ironically, that was in spite of the position I used this time being on the windward side of the hill-fort ridge. The breeze was mostly very light, but at times did rise to about 3 Bft, which should have necessitated cutting out some bits, but in this case the recorder was low down and sheltered by some rather stunted bracken, and nothing had to be cut out because of wind. The full recording was some 2h 9', but this got reduced to 1h 47', almost entirely because of high-altitude aeroplanes. I did, however, include one of the latter (not very intrusive), because of the high level of bees / flies activity just then, and I also included the one lower-altitude propellor aeroplane that passed by, because it didn't sound really inharmonious and it would come out more interestingly in the half-speed version of the recording, and more so still in the expected Nature-Symphony produced from it.

I made the recording over the middle part of the day just outside the rounded south-east corner of Cranbrook Castle (an ancient hill fort), on top of Cranbrook Down, high above (south of) Fingle Bridge (Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK).

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. For playback volume purposes, please note that the very close bumblebee starting about 1'20 is by far the loudest sound in this half of the edited recording, so best not to turn the volume down at that point, or you'd lose a lot of what follows!

High-grade headphones strongly recommended, to hear all the detail.

This recording running. We're looking roughly south.

Closer view of recorder placement during this recording. There are some bramble flowers lurking in the shade of the bracken, very close to the recorder — very attractive to bumblebees. Note that I set the recorder to be facing steeply upwards, to pick up the most sounds, with most detail (i.e, in this particular situation).

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 (very little) microphone wind noise, so that what remains of that is generally pleasant to the ear and just a nice bit of the 'landscape'.

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