I lurk on naturerecordists-L because I hope to record birds someday. I
have been slowly assimilating equipment recommendations and recording
techniques (in theory) over the past year, to say nothing of enjoying
the recordings other people have posted.
In the meantime, I use the stereo head-mounted microphones I was born
with, and store the recordings in slow, unreliable biological memory.
A friend and I went up to the Kumaon Himalayas in mid-February, with a
new tent and five days of vacation time. We camped for two nights near
Vinayak looking for Cheer Pheasants (Catreus wallichii; heard many, saw
none), then drove to the Sat Tal ("Seven Lakes") area. We tried to pitch
the tent there, but a sudden violent hailstorm intervened, and we spent
the night drying our gear in front of a room heater in a hotel.
This post is about the next night, our last in Sat Tal before we headed
back to Delhi the next day. My friend ate something that disagreed with
him, and felt unwell enough to return to the hotel. I had found a nice
camp site while hiking during the day, but the evening brought rapidly
fading light and ominous thunder from just over the hill.
What to do?
I pitched the tent in a clearing in the forest beside Panna Tal. It was
almost dark when I got the fly sheet securely staked down, and I still
hadn't convinced myself that this was a good idea. That afternoon, the
Pradhan (head) of Mehragaon (a nearby village) had treated me to a rant
about increasing crime rates in the area and, as an afterthought, told
me a story about a Leopard having snatched a dog from his house a few
nights before; and there I was, alone in the forest, a couple of
kilometres from the nearest human habitation.
I got in, and zipped the tent door shut.
Fifteen minutes later, I was in my sleeping bag, watching light from the
moonrise filter in through the roof of the tent. I was lying in a large
clearing at the foot of a hill, between the road to Sat Tal (some fifty
metres behind me) and Panna Tal (barely twenty metres from my feet). The
road ran flat and straight for a few hundred metres along the forest's
edge, but otherwise wound its way up the hillside to Mehragaon (to my
left) or, in the other direction, downhill to Sat Tal.
The first thing I noticed was the stereo field: I could hear cars coming
downhill, starting all the way at the top, far to my left, slowly moving
closer to my head and then, as the road curved back, moving to the left
again, but not as far away as before. Three loops, getting closer each
time; accelerating on the short straight stretch, and shooting past my
head and into the right side of my "view", then receding slowly.
(Lying there in the dark, straining my ears to hear footsteps or wild
animals, I learned a valuable lesson about handling noise: every time
I thought I heard something moving around outside the tent, it turned
out to be my trousers rubbing against the sleeping bag, or the zipper
of the bag clicking, or something similarly innocuous (wait, is that
handling noise or self noise? :-). But I relaxed, took deep breaths,
and was eventually able to lie quite still and focus on sounds that
really originated outside the tent.)
As night fell, the traffic slowly ceased. It didn't feel like it was
going to rain (despite the earlier thunder), and there wasn't much of
a wind either. In the comparative silence, I slowly began to be aware
of more and more hitherto unnoticed sounds.
The forest around me was filled with the sounds of twigs snapping and
leaves settling. An occasional gust of wind would touch the clearing,
making the fly sheet rattle, blowing a few leaves around, making the
trees whisper. If I strained my hearing, I fancied I could hear the
lake's edge lapping at some stone steps on the bank. I heard some thin,
Minivet-like whistles, but they stopped quickly, and were not repeated.
I could hear small animals (squirrels?) moving about in the forest and
scampering away after being frightened by something I couldn't hear. A
few times, I heard something scrabbling and scratching in the leaf
litter on the hillside (Pheasants? But at night?).
Some distant Red-Wattled Lapwings (Vanellus indicus) -- unexpected, but
unmistakable, with their panicked "Did heee do it?" calls -- took alarm
at something and took off in their wheeling flight, as they tend to do
at the slightest excuse. A flock of Slaty-Headed Parakeets (Psittacula
himalayana), disturbed in their sleep, called a few times to make sure
everything was all right (toooi?), and then settled down again.
Suddenly, very close by, I heard a flock of Geese in flight, with their
loud, haunting, discordant cacophony of honking drowning out everything
else. I hadn't expected to encounter any Geese in the mountains, and I
was comforted by the familiarity of the sound. I heard the flock start
down the hill and fly over my camp site, and land in the lake with an
occasional honk and many quiet splashes.
Not far away, a Mountain Scops Owls (Otus spilocephalus) started up its
measured, monotonous "pink pink" call, a sound that was repeated through
the night by different individuals, sometimes without pause for half an
hour or more. I'd spotted an Asian Barred Owlet (Glaucidium cuculoides)
sitting in a bare tree while looking for a camp site; and now and then,
one of them would pipe up with a quavering "oop-op-op-op-op", then fall
silent again. I also heard a deep Bubo-like "hoo-hoo" call a few times,
but I don't know what it was.
Another intriguing call that I could not identify was an accelerating
series of "hoo"s, starting with widely spaced notes and ending with a
Dove-like crooning rattle: "Hoo [pause] hoo [shorter pause] hoo [short
pause] ho... ho-ho-h-h-h" (Imagine dropping a marble on the floor from
a height. This call fit that pattern in its execution). There seemed to
be only one individual, and it repeated this call several times, with
pauses, at around 2200, but much less frequently later at night.
One sound that featured in my recording only by its absence, thankfully,
was the rasping cough of a Leopard. I've never heard one before, but by
all accounts, I would have been able to recognise it... I certainly was
paying attention! But if a Leopard came to drink at the lake that night
(as I'd been told they often do), it arrived and departed in silence.
But there were plenty of sounds to keep me guessing. I could hear grunts
and sighs from the forest, Langurs coughing, an occasional Barking Deer
breaking the silence with its sharp bark, and being answered somewhere
up the hill. Twigs kept snapping as things moved about in the shrubbery.
There was a pained, long-drawn-out groaning noise ending in a quiet sigh
(which I hoped was only a frog!). Branches creaked as they settled into
their sleep, and I heard the occasional mouse-like chittering (but could
only imagine the interested Owls nearby). As night wore on, I also heard
what sounded like grass being quietly munched irregularly somewhere in
the clearing.
At some point, I drifted off to sleep.
I woke up before dawn, and was surprised to realise that I'd slept very
well. Over the past few days, I had grown used to waking early, to the
loud, harsh "Kok-KOK-kok-kok" calls of the Koklass Pheasant (Pucrasia
macrolopha), but it was eerily quiet in comparison. There was no wind,
no creaking trees, no insects, not even distant bird calls, nothing.
As I stuck my head out of the tent, a started Barking Deer bounded away
from the clearing, and in the silence, I set to taking the tent apart.
-- ams
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