Listen to the birds, with Stefan Taylor
Just north of Nedd there is extensive woodland surrounding a small brackish lochan (photo 1), in an area known as Duart (dubh ard = dark promontory). Four members of the Field Club visited this site on Sunday 4th May 2025 to explore bird recording techniques with Stefan Taylor.
We heard cuckoo, redpoll and willow warbler on the way down to the loch. Here we stopped, just inside the tree cover on the south side of the loch (photo 2) and Stefan deployed equipment for live listening with the group.
Live listening
This consisted of a digital audio recorder (Tascam DR-100mkIII linear PCM digital recorder) with parabolic microphone dish system (Telinga stereo DAT dish system) and Sennheiser HD280 headphones (photo 3). The parabolic dish is used to amplify sounds coming from one direction so is ideal for picking out and identifying individual bird or animal sounds.
It picked out common sandpiper, a pair of red-breasted merganser and greylag geese around the loch, distant greenshank and oystercatcher, and blue tit, chaffinch and great tit in the woodland.
Before we left, Stefan installed further equipment to record sounds in our absence (photo 4). This is known as a ‘drop-rig’ in wildlife sound recording: quick to set up in the field causing the minimum disturbance to wildlife.
Unattended recording
This consisted of a digital audio recorder (Sony PCM-M10) with pair of omnidirectional condenser microphones (LOM Usi with furry windshields). The microphones were spaced about a human head’s width apart on a branch so as to create what is known as ‘a binaural stereo recording’ (photo 5).
When played back through stereo headphones this produces the most ‘lifelike’ listening experience. The recorder was placed in a camouflaged ‘dry-bag’ to protect it from rain. The equipment was collected 2 days later and about 30 hours was recorded onto the recorder’s SD card until it became full.
Listening and processing the recording:
The recorder’s SD-card was removed and Audacity audio-processing software used on a Macintosh computer to process the recording. Highlights such as birds calling were identified by looking at the visual spectrogram of the recording (photo 6) and listening/identifying these calls which show as ‘spikes’ on the spectrogram (the spike in the middle of the image of the spectrogram is an oystercatcher calling).
This saves having to listen to the whole 30-hour recording! The highlights were then edited and pasted together to make a final ‘cut’ of the 30 hours condensed down to a few minutes. This was saved in MP3 format which is the most universally compatible format, – playable on the widest range of devices.
Highlights
The edited recording (7) starts with calling common sandpipers.
(7) Edited Recording – Click > to Listen
At 6 seconds, greylag geese are calling, and at 12 seconds a shelduck does its laughing call, with a repeat at 50 seconds.
At 1 minute 11 seconds, a cuckoo starts up and, at 2 minutes 21 seconds, an oystercatcher calls.
At 2 minutes 24 seconds, a redpoll makes its trilling call.
The recording finishes with the common sandpiper at 2 minutes 45 seconds.
Background birds include great tit, chaffinch, song thrush, willow warbler and wren.
Returning through the rainforest
After an hour or so we slowly made our way back, along the edge of impressive ‘Atlantic rainforest’ that covers the huge boulder scree at the foot of a high crag. There were a variety of ancient trees, including an impressive upright hazel with a huge single trunk, sprawling grey willows and several oaks at the base of the crag. The boulders were draped with mosses and liverworts, interspersed with the moss-like fronds of Wilson’s filmy-fern, and between them in places there were large patches of wild garlic (photo 8).
Stefan Taylor and Ian M. Evans