Firstly, I'd like to thank existing members of the group for contributing t=
o the wealth of
useful information & lively debates I've found here so far.
After living & working in the south of England most of our lives, my partne=
r and I moved to
a remote old stone farm house in rural mid-wales early last year. The absen=
ce of man-
made noise & light pollution here is wonderful!
On fine days, the only sounds outside are made by wildlife. On still nights=
the silence is
almost total (less than 50dB, my dB meter doesn't go down any lower!) broke=
n only by
calls of barn owl or rustlings from creatures in the undergrowth. Bats roos=
t in the eves of
the house & emerge at dusk on summer nights. They chitter softly in the aud=
ible
frequency range as they leave the roost. Fatballs hung for the birds in th=
e apple tree
outside the kitchen window attract blue tits, great tits, nuthatch and wood=
peckers. Raven,
buzzard & red kite are often seen overhead.
Surrounded by all this wildlife somewhere potentially so quiet (weather per=
mitting)
rekindled our interest in wildlife recording. We'd tried to record nesting =
rooks a some
years ago but with poor results - due to continual man-made noise (mainly f=
rom traffic &
aircraft) audible in the local countryside and the limitations of our porta=
ble cassette
equipment. We tried with a portable minidisk recorder a few years later - t=
he tape hiss had
gone, but the combination of increased traffic noise and early minidisk com=
pression was
no improvement!
Luckily moving house had left a little spare money available, just at the =
time when was a
choice of affordable solid state audio recorders available. After studying =
all the technical
specifications & some internet research, we bought a Tascam HD-P2 and so f=
ar are very
pleased with it.
A few weeks ago, on a nice still day, we fitted our Behringer measuring mik=
e into a tube of
foam pipe insulation and tied it up in the apple tree near to a hanging fat=
ball to see what
we could record. A long XLR cable ran in through the slightly open kitchen =
window to the
HD-P2 on the kitchen table. Switching to the internal speaker of the HD-P2=
filled the
downstairs rooms with birdsong - so we left the recorder running for a coup=
le of hours
and went about our normal business, popping back into the kitchen to note d=
own the time
every time we heard any interesting bird sounds.
I copied the resultant .WAV onto my Mac and played it back - and it was imm=
ediately
obvious that a much lower noise mic will be needed. What I had taken to be =
noise due to
monitoring on the HD-P2's internal speaker *was* on the recording. Despite =
this, we did
record some interesting "blue tit politics" as they argued over the fat bal=
l, some lovely
whirring of wings, noisy landings on branches, tits pecking at seeds (and o=
ne pecking at
the mic), a nearby blackbird song, a distant passing raven, and as dusk fel=
l, the call of a
barn owl.)
We are now in the process of deciding on a new low noise microphone - witho=
ut having to
spend large amounts of cash. The price of decent quality shotgun mikes is s=
omewhat
scary, and as a next stage we are considering the Rode NT1A due to it's ve=
ry low self-
noise. I've already read many posts to this forum regarding the unsuitabili=
ty of this type of
mic to damp conditions, initially we would only use it for outside on a st=
ill, dry day to
record the birds that come close to the house, and maybe the audible sounds=
made by the
bats - although it will be interesting to see if the bat sounds above 20KHz=
could be
recorded, then pitch shifted down with software on the Mac to make them aud=
ible.
My partner recently acquired an old satellite TV parabolic dish - it's made=
of heavy beige
plastic & is about 4ft in diameter, but has a rather shallow dish. He's goi=
ng to try and
mount it on a video camera tripod and make a DIY support for a mic, so we c=
an set it up in
the yard to try for more directional recordings of birds in trees opposite =
the house, or on a
nearby barn roof - which seems to be a favourite place from them to sing!
We will let you know how successful any of the above is!
"Microphones are not ears,
Loudspeakers are not birds,
A listening room is not nature."
Klas Strandberg
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