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Re: one night by a lake

Subject: Re: one night by a lake
From: "John Hartog" hartogj
Date: Fri Mar 21, 2008 8:45 am ((PDT))
Hi ams,

Your nature sound writing is fantastic.  Keep your pen as your primary
recorder.

John Hartog




--- In  Abhijit Menon-Sen <>
wrote:
>
> 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.
> 
> -- 




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