Blackbird paradise, just upstream from Teign Gorge

Extended afternoon birds' chorus, with many blackbirds and at times mostly distant mistle thrushes, with the gentle background sound of the River Teign close by.

This was an amazing serendipity, for the day was a failure for my original objective and indeed also for my Plan B! In the morning I set up wind chimes by Hunting Gate again, to record high up on the Hunter's Path, but the wind failed me for that. The birds around there were singing particularly well, but my Plan B pair of long recordings there just for the birds was trashed by the huge amount and variety of disturbances, especially the almost constant succession of seemingly malevolent mostly high-altitude aeroplanes that gatecrashed on the proceedings whenever the birds were giving a really good performance.

However, during my early morning walk-in I'd noticed a particularly impressive blackbird chorus just before entering the Teign Gorge woods, so returned to there for an afternoon 'Plan C'.

The concurrent pair of 3+-hour recordings I obtained there — thankfully the malevolent aeroplanes had all gone elsewhere by then — captured by far the most extended and at times seemingly rapturous non-dawn-chorus blackbird performances I could remember hearing, and indeed the recordings have little time at all without blackbirds somewhere in the soundscape, apart, perhaps, one several-minute section when a foreground song thrush holds the stage instead.

Apart from blackbirds and rather elusive mistle thrushes, we also hear a lot of blackcap, robin, wren, some chiffchaff, with a short episode of 'mewing' calls of a pair of buzzards early on — and of course other species too.

This recording taking place. I lifted this composite photo from my old CD cover artwork for it; blackbird and ivy were actually from a photo I took on the north Cornwall coast, and I put it here to hide a jarringly coloured fence post! The recorder's tripod is almost against the fence but not touching it. The concurrent recording was made from the top of a fence post in the distance almost straight ahead of us. The track follows round to the left to enter the woods at the west end of the so-called Teign Gorge. The River Teign passes by just off to the right.

This recording taking place; the arrow points to the recorder (hardly visible). The nearer recorder, perched on a fence post, is making the concurrent recording.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was used on a full-size Zipshot tripod almost against, but not touching, the wire fence.

Initial post-recording processing was to use Audacity to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the furry windshields, with a 6dB cut in lower bass frequencies in order to tame the mic wind noise (I didn't know about dynamic EQ back then).

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