Nocturnal bird recording (1 Viewer)

I had a go at this last night, though seemingly without recording any notable birds.

My kit:
Olympus LS11
Sennheiser ME66 mounted on a tripod.

I did the recording from my bedroom with the window open. I was worried that the recording would be drowned out by the sound of me snoring but reassuringly this didn't seem to happen. Despite living just across the street from Mark I'm probably not quite as well positioned for recording as both sides of my flat are quite noisy, with the street on one side and Aberdeen harbour on the other. I recorded 9 hours 21 mins in all as an MP3. The recording was fairly good quality but it was a bit tricky for my computer to handle the size of file.

Reading the sound file on Audacity is probably the key skill. It's tricky where I am because there's always significant background noise, though this seemed to drop off a bit after midnight. Some sounds are quite easy to pick out. A thorough look through easily revealed several barking dogs, a couple of car alarms and a drunk bloke coming home from the pub. Sharp sounds are easy to spot e.g. the beating of wings from a Feral Pigeon and the long call from a Herring Gull. Softer sounds from passerines are very easy to miss. The ticking of a Robin is almost invisible and the song is only noticeable when very close. The last 45 minutes of the recording (from around 6am) include quite good numbers of Meadow Pipits going over (a strong passage this morning), as well as several Goldfinches and a Grey Wagtail. I only picked these up by listening to the recording and not from the visual display though. It might be easier if I convert the recording to a sonogram, though doing that for the whole recording is probably more than my computer can manage.

Well, I never got round to doing this in France, primarily because of wine.

So, back to recording the night time sounds of Torry. To be more accurate though, last night it was back to recording the night time sounds of my spare bedroom, as there was a problem with the external microphone that was pointing out of the window.

Hopefully I can sort it out for tonights session. There are still plenty of waders on the move and I'm expecting pink-footed geese any day now.

Also, potentially some SM3 or SM4 recordings might feature here soon - fingers crossed.

A much more successful session last night. Firstly, I managed to record the stuff that was going on outside rather than the stuff that was going on inside. This was probably a major reason why I managed to record a nice selection of birds.

These were, in no order, a distant common tern (that's three nights out of four for this species) just after 5 in the morning, a robin at 2:45 (a single tic note) a single grey wagtail call 2 minutes before it, and then my two favourites of the evening - the unmistakable tsee tsee tsee of a goldcrest at 2:40, and a single golden plover at 3:40.

Spectograms attached for the last two. I'll let you work out which is which...

The first pinkfeet were recorded at Loch of Strathbeg today, so I guess these should feature soon.

Fat Paul Scholes said:

Well, I never got round to doing this in France, primarily because of wine.

So, back to recording the night time sounds of Torry. To be more accurate though, last night it was back to recording the night time sounds of my spare bedroom, as there was a problem with the external microphone that was pointing out of the window.

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You must have had something. Flock wallpaper? Or a set of those iconic ducks perhaps ... ?

Right on cue - a flock of pink-footed geese went over last night at about 00:50. Wouldn't like to put too precise a number on it but it could have been 30 or 40 birds at least. The only other bird I recorded in about 2 hours was a single song thrush. Quite a few grounded this morning at nearby girdle ness, which tallies nicely.

The reason I only managed 2 hours worth of recording was that the batteries ran out on my R-05. The lesson here is that even if the battery icon says full (or very nearly full, as it did for me last night) it's worth putting a fresh pair of batteries in for every recording session. I'm using rechargable 'energizer' AA batteries that can easily cope with 6 or 7 hour session of recording when fully charged.

Spectograms of pink-footed goose flock and single song thrush note...

Good equipment setup just published here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.12678/full

I know some of the people at Cornell lab of Ornithology has done similar things.

Niels

Very a propos: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166866#pone.0166866.s001 about nocturnal recording and possibly automation?

Niels

Seems like an ideal location here to record nocturnal calls. No neighbours, cars, barking dogs, sirens etc.etc. seems like all I needed to do was buy a suitable recorder, leave it out overnight and then whiz through the hours of silence looking for the odd call. It's not really working out like that!

The problem is it's SO noisy - I just never tuned in to it before.

Pretty much constant cricket noise (and other insects) throughout the night, glis glis making a racket on every recording (31x 50 minute files so far) lots of bats, tawny owls and lots of things going crunch in the night.

The chances of me being able to pick up a bird call flying over are looking slim unless I can find a way to analyse the recordings better.

The good news is that I took a chance on the Tascam DR-05, £79 ish from Amazon and so far it seems like a great little machine.
It takes micro SDHC cards up to 32Gb and can be powered externally. One feature that looks useful is that you can limit file size and it just carries on recording the next one with no break. Once (if ever) I get to grips with Audacity it should make file size much more manageable (and it's easier to keep a track of where events are). I was a bit put off by the name Tascam tbh but then I found out it's made by TEAC.

I've got an old SE66 mic but so far haven't used it - this could help reduce a lot of the background noise and will be the next thing to try.

So far the only way I can find to locate interesting sounds is to fast forward through the recording in the machine and listen with headphones. This works for loud or lengthy calls but not sure how I'm going to pick up a passing wader or worse a small passerine.


Any suggestions for improving my chances would be very welcome - I'd be particularly interested in hearing how people are using Audacity to zero in on stuff. Things like which view to use, whether to use filters?

I can see that this could easily take up a lot of time - but it's also a lot of fun. I've got some interesting recordings already - the most curious of which is a strange electronic chirp from some unidentified bat which roosted very close to the recorder. Also got some good owl calls, a barking roe deer, tons of dormouse calls including a prolonged recording of one eating one of my nestboxes!
The only bird call I've managed to luck into while listening to something else was a passing Grey Heron.

Torchepot said:

Any suggestions for improving my chances would be very welcome.

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You could eat the Glis glis :t:

I expect there are recipes on the web.

John

Farnboro John said:

You could eat the Glis glis :t:

I expect there are recipes on the web.

John

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Now there's a thought - they do come ready made with a hazlenut stuffing!