During a stay at my mother's in the heart of France recently,
I noticed how there were literally hundreds of male frogs
doing their chorus in the night. This choire was actually
keeping us all awake ;-)
Luckily I had a recording set with me.
For those interested in a 14 minutes long chunk out of the
hours of croaking ribbits I'm now in posession of, here it is:
http://audio.jthz.com/rec/frrrogs_june2006.ogg (50 MB !)
The original recordings are worth money, so I'm not handing this out
uncompressed. This high bitrate Ogg Vorbis example is pretty much
transparent though.
Now for the mystery I want to solve:
While this (example) recording was made, I was a couple of hundred
meters away from the mics. Left it alone in the dark woods. This meant
that all kinds of night-creatures curiously came to check out my
recording set. This is why I've taken out THIS 15 minutes of the
total, there are some strange breathings and steps to be heard in the
recording.
You will notice how around 11:04 the frogs fall quiet. This is
probably the moment one or more larger animals or preditors close in
on where the set was. (The frogs also went silent when *I* entered the
scene, so that makes sense..)
Around 11:54 you hear the HD-recorder spin up its drive (unfortunately).
Around 12:18 you hear some kind of preditorial sound at the left..
Around 12:38 you hear how my right-channel microphone gets pulled down
by some animal. (Trust me, you would need some force to make that
happen..) Could this be a fox? I assume it's the animal you hear
snoring around 12:18.
The recording is binaural, where I carefully used a tree to service as
the head with the mics as its ears. The top was sawed off, and the
mics were at around 1.70 m height, as 'ears' directed towards this
lake: http://jult.nl/indre/lage_meer?full=1
The mics were positioned at the shoreside left of what you see in the
picture.
When I got there, I found the mic in the grass, and the recorder moved
away about 10 inches from its original spot. I had its buttons locked,
so it kept recording it all. Either way it's fascinating how amazingly
quiet this animal was..
I'm very curious what you think happened.
--
Julius Thyssen
|