Birds singing on a farm is not what I wanted to record on my trip to Exmoor National Park last week. My main focus was finding good locations for pristine dawn choruses, but it was difficult to get away from sheep. It's lambing season so they call continuously, especially in the mornings and evenings.
A great lesson I've learned when I started field recording is if you can't get away from it, embrace it. Dawn choruses this time of the year are lush and beautiful, even if they're interspersed with sheep bleating.
And as someone recently pointed out in a comment on one of my blog posts, my approach is sometimes rooted in an exclusionary concept of nature, with humans set apart from everything else (first) and seen as a necessarily negative influence (second). While that isn't always the case, some of the skills I developed over the years serve me well in getting away from man-made sound and identifying these fleeting pockets of natural quiet.
This is not the perfect dawn chorus or countryside ambience. It's not my favourite recording I've ever made either. It is however a good example of a layered soundscape. There's a strong birdsong foreground where several species alternate, from robins to a variety of tits, wrens and dunnocks. There are a few middle layers where other species are present - blackcaps, chiffchaffs, pheasants, crows etc. The background layer is the distant village ambience mostly made up of sheep and towards the end, some distant engines. It all ties together nicely and paints a balanced picture of life on the farm.
Recorded in Exmoor National Park with Sony PCM A10 and Clippy EM272 microphones. Enjoying the videos I upload on here? Feel free to support me by:
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#relaxation #naturesounds #britishcountryside
13 сен 2024
