Yet Another Cycling Forum
Random Musings => Miscellany => Where The Wild Things Are => Topic started by: BrianI on January 01, 2017, 09:52:34 am
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Forgot to turn my alarm clock off yesterday, so I was woken at 6:30am!
So a good excuse to pop out, and try my sony voice recorder & shotgun microphone to capture the dawn bird chorus at the public park behind the sorting office!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYUuPjWwRM
Interesting to hear the various bird calls, if anyone could help ID them?
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Brian, I think they are all pretty well one song thrush!
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Brian, I think they are all pretty well one song thrush!
That's that's that's definitely definitely definitely a song a song a song thrush.
Thrush thrush.
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Can anyone point me at which programme it was on R4 the other day that played the splendid recording of a seal 'talking' ? I think it was a recording from an aquarium in the US.
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Think it was 'Inside Science'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b085hs49 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b085hs49)
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Think it was 'Inside Science'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b085hs49 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b085hs49)
Ooo. You star. Bang on. Thank you.
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Not today (I'm usually late ;)) & no sound recordings, but..
I was walking yesterday through Solihull to the "Nature reserve" centre in Brueton Park (in quotes partly because it's still a work in progress. Also, since it's accessible from Solihull it plays a crucial role in connecting urban children with outdoors, having fun & getting muddy :thumbsup:). Approaching an evergreen hedge I heard the unmistakable sound of a house sparrow, possibly more than one.
However, Solihull doesn't do house sparrows (I suspect they're not classy enough ;)). We've been here for 23 years & I haven't seen or heard any in the borough in that time. Since we had them nesting under our roof tiles in SW Lincolnshire before we moved to the West Midlands their absence was a big cultural shock.
Is it good news?
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I enjoyed Brian's song thrush. Fairly unusual at this time of year. I have heard them occasionally between early November and late January, but not that often. The two most recent examples that spring (!) to mind was one in the deep, deep frosts after Christmas 2004 (memorable for being the month my mother died) and another occasion on a group ride from London to Cambridge in November about 3 or 4 years ago. Jane, another chap and I were in a mini-group and somewhere in a village about 10 miles before Cambridge one started up.
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I love the song of our song thrushes. I was waiting for a bus, near Solihull railway station, somewhen in the first 2 weeks of December (post cardiac catheter ablation, so no cycling for 2 weeks). A song thrush was singing; it wasn't quite the confident & elaborated song of the spring mating season. I listened and enjoyed.
Looked back to December 2006, when I rode from home through the early hours of a quiet Saturday morning to join an acf Christmas ride starting at Long Eaton. The robins were the first songsters. A song thrush or two followed, a bit north of Tamworth ;D.
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The birds are starting to sing.
This morning's commute was a classic. Patchy fog/mist near the water courses, but sun on the higher ground. I'd seen sunrise from the bedroom window, & when I emerged with bike, robins, great tits, the odd blue tit & what can only have been the liquid trills of a nuthatch greeted me.
As I descended to the Blythe valley, the mists reappeared and the birdsong stopped. This repeated. Every time I climbed (only 10 or 20m) out of the mists in the valleys, the birdsong reappeared.
Anyone for commuting by car :demon: ?
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Sadly not had much time for getting out wildlife sound recording recently. :-[
Although I have uploaded a longer recording of the Song Thrush I recorded on new years day 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrrPUUsv1hY
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The song thrushes have been slowly starting to sing what I would describe as sub-songs. The pattern of repeated phrase has been unmistakable. I heard a few more on my ride to work today. As I arrived at work, put on work boots and waited for the motorised part of the work party to arrive, I heard my first song thrush of the season that had more than one phrase to repeat. It was still a work in progress, but still worth celebrating in the joyful sounds in semi-ancient woodland on a cold drizzly winter day.
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Woohoo, I got my new digital sound recorder today, an Olympus LS-14, which can record at 96khz, 24bit PCM file. Should be a significant step up from my old Sony voice recorder, which can only record in mp3.
Hopefully i'll get a chance to have a play at the weekend. :thumbsup:
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I've got the Bat Recorder app on my phone which does 250kHz (with the Ultramic attached). That gives a really portable ultrasonic recording setup.
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I took the opportunity to go on a ranger led walk whilst on holiday where she was teaching us differnet birdsongs. I must confess I have not retained much but I did rememebr one the next day as the tone of a song thrush is unmistakeable. I must practice more.
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I took the opportunity to go on a ranger led walk whilst on holiday where she was teaching us differnet birdsongs. I must confess I have not retained much but I did rememebr one the next day as the tone of a song thrush is unmistakeable. I must practice more.
I can recommend Geoff Sample's 'Collins Bird Songs & Calls'. The CD collection 'chapterizes' calls into typical soundscapes and locations rather than the confusing taxonomical system. The intro is very useful as he 'trains' you to ID by sound. Easy when you are young but we loose the audio retention ability as we get older. And as you know in the U.K., most birds in the summer are heard and not seen. Tricky.
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Thanks, will give that a whirl.
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I can recommend Geoff Sample's 'Collins Bird Songs & Calls'. The CD collection 'chapterizes' calls into typical soundscapes and locations rather than the confusing taxonomical system. The intro is very useful as he 'trains' you to ID by sound. Easy when you are young but we loose the audio retention ability as we get older. And as you know in the U.K., most birds in the summer are heard and not seen. Tricky.
I attended a BTO course yesterday, where this book was recommended. It's a lovely book and the CDs are worth listening to in their own right.
We were given several mnemonics e.g Song Thrush=ST= Shouty Thrush ; Mistle Thrush=MT=Miserable Thrush.
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The song thrush call is such a tone that it is unmistakeable. I heard one as I walked back from staking out a bridge for otters (unsuccessfully) and then knew to look up at the top branches of the trees. There it was..
(https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2915/33674055420_88fc78294b_o.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/TiEkuq)Song Thrush (https://flic.kr/p/TiEkuq) by David Martin (https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmam/), on Flickr
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I've been playing with the BirdUp app which aims to identify birds by their sound. I went in via Balgay park as there is too much traffic noise on teh road. It identified varius things I didn't believe but did highlight a Bullfinch. I've never seen one there, but on playing the sample call it was very similar so score one there. Down on campus it found a chiffchaff, again another bird I have never seen (to my knowledge).
And the book 'Birdwatching with your eyes closed' has just landed on my desk.
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red kites calling over the house this morning and a fox barking last night :)
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My walk home from night shift yesterday morning: four song thrushes, a very vocal dunnock, a drumming yaffle, two robins, three wrens, a number of great tits, a blackbird and a chiffchaff.
I have a number of bird song CDs, but the Sample is a fave.
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Have you heard this program? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pnmxb
Stopped on the top of Cairn O'Mount on my way back from the race yesterday and listened - there was that creaky door sound of red grouse in the heather. Creaak-crik-crik-crik-crick.
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Which is usually followed, IME, by instructions to 'go back!'
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Duelling nightingales in the Camargue.
https://www.facebook.com/100009276557793/videos/1824122474573620/
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I put together some stills with the audio I recorded on Talisker Bay, Skye:
Worth listening with headphones on! :thumbsup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_5QNTzsiVY
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I've recently taken delivery of a couple of AudioMoth recorders so took the opportunity to try them out. Unfortunately the software I was using to find bat calls was not well behaved so I had to scan through the files. Seems to work well, until one took a dive off the raining and into the Tay. Fortunately it hit the wall on the way down which bounced it out and onto a bit of mud above the water so I was able to scramble down and rescue it.
I was comparing various enclosures to see how badly they attenuate the noise. Result is I need to do a bit more work on mine.
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I put the audiomoths in a local park. You do get strange looks wandering across the grass with a two section ladder :)
Unfortunately my maths was out by a bit (I was winging it) and the cards ran out of space. This is a bad thing as there is no filesystem protection - it will corrupt the filesystem and potentially destroy the card. Both of these happened. One card recoverable (and I got about 10% of the data). The other toast. literally.
Hard lesson learned.
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Here is a recent recording I made at Pittenweem, down by the old sea water swimming pool.
I used my Olympus LS 14 digital audio recorder, with a furry wind shield over it's built in microphones.
Best to listen in HD mode on the youtubes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KyhXDFkncM
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Happy #SpectrogramSunday, folks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MABTqlmh084
Revisited a recording I made back in 2017 of the dawn chorus, with an animated scrolling spectrogram courtesy of ffmpeg. :thumbsup:
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Lovely.
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Here are a couple of recordings from my new home on the upper Thame. https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/owl-trill-and-blackbird (https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/owl-trill-and-blackbird)
https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/reedwarbler (https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/reedwarbler)
Recorded on a old Zoom H4. Fun to run these through the free SpectrumView app.
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Happy Spectrogram Sunday folks! ;D
Took a wander around a local bit of woodland behind the local crematorium / golf club last night with my trusty Olympus LS14 recorder. Flocks of Crows / magpies etc coming into roost. Saw a couple of bats as well, wish I had taken my bat detector with me... Shame about the traffic noise, such is wildlife sound recording in an urban environment.
Audio processed & visualized using video screen grab of Sonic Visualizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL067XFj4B8
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Here are a couple of recordings from my new home on the upper Thame. https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/owl-trill-and-blackbird (https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/owl-trill-and-blackbird)
https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/reedwarbler (https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/reedwarbler)
Recorded on a old Zoom H4. Fun to run these through the free SpectrumView app.
Lovely recordings, PaulR :-) :thumbsup:
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I have the sound of curlews recorded on Seasalter beach as the alarm on my iPhone.
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I'm kind of hoping that we'll have curlews here a bit later in the year. I love the noise they make.
Here are some bits of noise from 24 March:https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/sets/24-march-2019 (https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/sets/24-march-2019)
The longer clip features a bonus duck at about 27s.
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It was certainly worth nosying around the woods behind the glamping hut I was staying at on Wednesday evening:
https://youtu.be/X-xeZtPOQoI
Audio visualised using Sonic Visualiser - a very interesting (and free!) app if you are into analysing audio.
https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/ (https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/) To create the video, I simply did a screen capture of Sonic Visualiser playing back. :thumbsup:
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And a dawn chorus at 6:30am on the Thursday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCOsVdylZ9g
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Testing the DIY Hydrophone, recording some molluscs in a rockpool, munching away!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ThrlvRBt4Q :thumbsup:
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Testing the DIY Hydrophone, recording some molluscs in a rockpool, munching away!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ThrlvRBt4Q :thumbsup:
Brilliant stuff - that's dedication!
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On Sunday I took my Zoom H4 out for a walk by the Thame and enjoyed cuckoo, reed warblers, sedge warblers, reed buntings, wrens and passing aircraft.
https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/sets/birdsong-may-2019 (https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/sets/birdsong-may-2019)
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We seem to have gained a resident song thrush here
https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/song-thrush-in-garden (https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/song-thrush-in-garden)
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I'm really looking forward to better weather - at the very least less wind so that I can capture more wildlife sounds. I've just been reminding myself about these nightjars near Dunwich last July: https://soundcloud.com/user-143636955/nightjars-at-westleton-heath-10-07-19
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Out with my trusty Olympus LS14 (and my DIY stereo pair microphones) at Calais Woods, Dunfermline yesterday as part of my allowed Lockdown Exercise:
https://youtu.be/8TwPBeJyFBA :thumbsup: Sonic Visualizer used to do the fancy scrolling spectrogram.