We first heard rumours that ravens had arrived in the locality last winter and sightings through the spring and summer confirmed a resident presence. As summer started to turn to Autumn a few weeks ago the calls of ravens in the air began to become a regular occurrence around the…
I first found a Roesel’s bush-cricket in the summer of 2009 in the long grass of some set-a-side land behind the string of houses in our small hamlet. That land is now consumed into a garden, but I digress. I came across one again the other week in the warmth…
Canadian wildlife sound recording artist John Neville has been recording wildlife and the birds of his native Canada for a number of years. When he made contact asking to use a recording I had made of a Nightingale in a presentation on the dawn chorus at this year’s International Ornithological…
Regular readers of this blog will know that for eighteen months or so we made a close acquaintance of our garden robin – a relationship cultivated and maintained by a steady supply of live mealworms – you can read about it here. Our Robin, as she became to be known,…
There is no getting away from it. If you want to be up before the birds in the spring, there is no getting up at all. For my particular body clock, the best strategy is to stay up through the night and do your best to catch up on sleep…
Two kingfishers flew away down the ditch, peeping as they went as we turned the corner by the mill. The monochrome palette of the pre-dawn light helped us pick a path around ice-crisped puddles and find a spot to place microphones, hidden by a bank and close the edge of…
Our introduction to the breeding colony of grey seals that frequent the beaches of Norfolk between Horsey and Winterton as part of a Wildlife Sound Recording Society field trip in December 2016 had been a wonderful experience. So when the calendar ticked over to November last year plans began to…
This is a mono recording taking from a mound nest of the southern wood ant Formica rufa in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire on a warm, sunny day in July 2017. JrF Contact microphone to Sound Devices 702
It was in the late summer and autumn of 2016 that the relationship with our garden robin truly began to take on a new depth. When we were tidying the flowerbeds it would often alight next to one of us, often within no more than a couple of feet. And if…
I saw my first wheatear on the grass retaining bank near the car-park at Wilstone Reservoir near Tring. It was a bracing spring day – clear skies, bright sunshine and a nipping wind that stung the cheeks as I searched the hedgerow for a singing chiff-chaff that had caught my…
