And then the hobbies came
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…
A winter dawn on the Broads
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…
Time with the seals
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…
moonrise, sunset – St Andrews, Scotland
Wood ants in the Beeches
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
A Robin in the garden
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…
Signposts #1: Black Water, White Rocks – Patrick Franke
Since becoming interested in wildlife and field sound recording a few years ago I have had the pleasure of meeting some wonderful people, many of whom have been kind enough to share their knowledge and experience as I began to learn the craft. One of those is Patrick Franke whose…
Northern Wheatear
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…
Meet the youngster
Over the last year or so, we have built a rather special relationship with a robin in our garden. The story is worthy of a longer post, but as a bit of a taster, here’s an image of the last fledgling from the multiple broods raised by ‘our’ robin this spring…
Bitterns in flight
Lakenheath Reserve is one of our favourite places and on a visit back in June it was again the venue for a wonderful wildlife encounter. Leaving the car-park shortly before dawn, we made our way out at a steady pace through reed-beds alive to the sound of sedge and reed…