Posted by: "asiootusloe"
>
>
> Hi David,
> Some info from Ithaca resident! There are lots of frogs calling. but
> as for quiet places, I am afraid they seem to be fewer these days.
> You could try Connecticut Hill Ponds, Sapsucker Woods Ponds, Bull
> Pasture ponds, Thomas Road Pond etc. But road traffic is amazing and
> can be heard several miles away. So it all depends on your luck and
> how quick you are to get some decent recordings just before the next
> car comes. In connecticut hills the noise is mostly of planes and
> amazingly sometimes even at night there are as many as six planes
> flying overhead. It seems to be a major fly way for international
> routes.
There are some things you can do to help tone down unwanted distant noise.
Set a directional mic very high relative to your subjects and pointed
down. This will help cut out the mic also picking up distant noise along
the direction it's pointing. The pickup field of a mic is three
dimensional, so you have to think in those terms.
The second way is to use a stereo setup. You can then take advantage of
the best sound filter we have, our own processing of the sounds in our
brains. It's much easier to pick out the frogs if their call has a
direction that's different from the noise in the stereo field. Again if
the stereo setup has directionality high and pointing down also helps.
Or if you are limited to the ground, position yourself so that the major
noise source is behind the mic with the frogs in front. Yes, that may
involve wading in the swamp, but you are a dedicated nature recordist
(or are you?).
Note for those recording feathered dinosaurs (birds) getting under ones
in the trees and recording up with a directional setup can help with
distant highways, though often not with airplanes.
BTW, I did not invent the term Fieldcraft, others have used it far
longer than I have.
Last quite a few species of frogs are set off calling by passing cars,
airplanes or whatever. You can get useful bits of calling by taking
advantage of this. I've even been known to have someone drive by some
particularly reluctant bunch of frogs just to set them off. Playback
could work too, but I'm not normally set up for that. I do use vocal
calls I make with some species.
Walt
"While a picture is worth a thousand words, a
sound is worth a thousand pictures." R. Murray Schafer via Bernie Krause
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