I love curlews – they may be common as muck round these parts but the beautiful plumage, strange down curved bill and haunting bubbling call make them special.
Curlew at Melton Riverside
The little nature reserve at Melton has a free car park and you can get a view of the riverside mudflats near Wilford Bridge
Riverside
the board gives some of the history
It’s a pleasant walk along the river into Woodbridge, there is another small level crossing to get into the town. On the other side to Wilford Bridge going north there is a footpath toward Broweswell reedbeds and it’s worth a look at the birds on the riverside there too
Trimley Marshes – next to the massive container port of Felixstowe
SWT reserve Trimley Marshes is a long walk from the car park – about 2 miles to the hides. That’s good because it means you can sometimes have the place to yourself 🙂 On a bright winter day like today it is the Suffolk coast at it’s best, despite the surreal juxtaposition of the low rumbling sounds of the container port with the calls of the birds. The noise of the container port fades with distance. The port is behind you when looking at the birds, the sound wasn’t obtrusive from the second hide onwards.
tranquil view of the reedbeds at TrimleyBrent Geese arriving
I was treated to some lovely views of winter ducks – teal, wigeon, shelduck, and it was good to see a decent size flock of Lapwing.
recording of teal and wigeon – the wigeon are the whisting sounds and the teal are the regular metallic sounds
Handsome male Stonechat and his mate in front of the hide
note – this is a Mk 1 version of the Canon EF 100-400 L
A working photographer uses their lenses all the time and probably never runs into this. I was into bird photography for a while, about eight years ago, and had the Canon EF100-400 IS L like every other wannabe bird photographer. In between now and then the field has separated the sheep from the goats – real bird photographers use longer primes, because the birds are always at the long end of any zoom. Or they use astro scopes on manual focus 😉
Lapwings landing
Anyway, I take time out from birds and photography, because life gets in the way, and I stow the lenses in a relatively cold room. A couple of years back I figured I’d take some long lens pics, and get greeted by this
Lens fungus. Nasty
which makes me curse. Mainly on the front element, though a starting spot on the inner element, which is part of the IS mech. The inner part is magnified by the biconvex front element. The spotty crap is on the inside of the front element, the fine filigree round the edge on the front of the front element. Continue reading “Canon EF 100-400 L lens fungus attack”
The idea is simple enough – a bird feeder camera on the network, using the Pi and associated camera. Using motion detection software I can pick out the birds. Of course I will also get the feeders swinging in the wind 😉
Although this is about running motion I can use videolan instead to stream the video as a netcam and use motion on a second machine. Videolan streaming
is nice on the Pi, because it seems the camera can do the h264 in some sort of hardware/accelerated mode in the V4l driver. I can then watch the birds with realtime update rates on my LAN. That’s for another day…
Spadgers
Up to about mid 2014 it used to be a load of hurt to run Motion and the Raspberry Pi camera because there were no videoforlinux drivers for the camera. That way you don’t get a /dev/video0 for the Pi Camera and needed workarounds for Motion.
Tucked away off the A1101 it’s easy to overshoot the turnoff because the bend of the road means the sign isn’t visible till you are nearly on the turn – even knowing that it caught me out. The low winter light was a treat on the leafless trees, painting them this lovely golden colour.
lovely golden light on the reserve
A lot of the water was still ice-bound, with a few channels of open water. All over the sailing club lake there was a marvellous ringing sound of teal. Not worth recording however since it sounded like the RAF were warming up their afterburners at RAF Honington.
The island only seemed to hold about twenty teal but their calls rang out over the water sounding like many more. I had the reserve largely to myself, with only a couple of photographers with hardy camo gear in the morning.
Visitor centre – newly upgraded in January
Monday seems to be the quietest day – the visitor centre wasn’t open though Suffolk Wildlife Trust did leave access to the toilets which is a kindness 😉 The small birds were staking out territories in the hazel coppice which was alive with the sound of competing great tits, which seem early to me – they haven’t started seriously marking out territory nearer home.
January has been quite sunny and mild this year so I visited the snowdrop walks in Walsingham abbey gardens. It was turning colder for the first day of the snowdrop walks
Only a few other people braved the cold on the first day
This is a description of how to make a remote farm camera. Smallholders don’t always live on site, or you may have an island site somewhere without power. The simplest solution to get pictures from a remote site without power is to use a 3G trail camera and these work very well for tracking wildlife.
The trouble with this solution on a farm is that animals are meant to be on a farm all the time, Trail cameras look for warm-blooded critters so mammals and birds will set it off all the time, making this an expensive operation in MMS messages, which seems to be the preferred method. Even if you get a MMS bundle, trawling through the false alarms will bore you.
What we wanted of a remote farm camera
was to be able to check on how things were going, and whether something has been damaged by stormy weather. A CCTV camera on the farm would be fine, but the problem with this is the power drain, and getting the pictures back. If we had mains power this would be a lot easier, we could use a 3G CCTV DVR with remote access capability. You can easily get 12V CCTV gear, but the power drain of a typical DVR and camera is quite harsh – typically 1A or more. A typical leisure battery is 80Ah, but you should only use half of the capacity of a lead-acid battery that to avoid reducing the service life of the battery, and you must never fully discharge it. This gives you a battery life of less than two days.
Our remote farm camera uses a Raspberry Pi Model A and associated camera to take a picture every 15 minutes in the daytime and upload it to a website
The Internet has done for many older forms of exchanging information – physical newspapers and magazine curculations are a shadow of their former selves. Much of this is Schumpeter’s Gale at work. it simply makes it easier to share information and ideas by disntermediating. The publishers and gatekeepers of the old world are rendered redundant. This isn’t an unalloyed win – they performed a role in screening out the rubbish, and this role has now moved to the search engines to try and make sense of the multimedia firehose pointed at your face.
the logo of the former British Sound Recording Association
People moaned that printed publications tended to favour articles that promoted their advertisers’ products. I’m not quite sure that Google adsense is necessarily a step up from that, but being able to share audio, video, images and writing all in the space of a generation is great.
The Long, Slow Vanish Of Britain’s Illustrious Recording Clubs
When the Society was formed, back in 1968, there were many tape recording societies around the country, today there are very a few. A google search only found one other. WSRS has stood the test of time because of the society’s specialist interest.[wildlife sounds]
Paul Pratley, WSRS secretary 2014
and Google was indeed my friend, it’s possible that Paul was already behind the times. The British Sound Recording Association closed its doors in a meeting in Oxford, to be ratified in November 2014.
NPR has a short radio piece with a few snippets culled from the BSRA’s last meeting in Oxford in June 2014. On the face of it it this seems bizarre – in a world full of podcasters and with sound being used more and more for non-music uses it puzzles me how and where the BSRA failed to move forward. I was never a member because I didn’t see what I could learn from it, and I am not a competition guy – I have never been, either in the fields of sound recording or photography, despite the fact than I manage to take pictures and field recordings that people license. I don’t decry competitions or competing – I simply don’t understand.
The problem was called out over forty years ago – if sound is about all about music for you, buy a a good stereo system, not a tape recorder
Dropout called out the problem, in his valedictory column in the last issue of Tape Recorder magazine [ref]Tape Recorder, April 1970 page 173; you can find back issues in PDF at http://www.americanradiohistory.com/ – look for Studio Sound in Audio and Recording[/ref] issue before it became Studio Sound.
RECORDING BEGINS WITH A MICROPHONE
Recording begins, oddly enough, with a microphone ; and what your amateur recordist lacks is access to signals which are worth recording, if his interest be confined to music.
Oh, something can be done along those lines ; but how many tapes have you made which
you can replay with the kind of musical satisfaction you get from your chosen repertory
of discs? I’ll bet it’s very few ; I know it is with me.
But then, I long ago abandoned that fantasy, and began to derive my reproduced music from the radio and the gramophone. I use my recorders—three mains’ machines and a battery-portable—for other things; and when I say use, I mean use.
But, with reluctance, I have come to the conclusion that most amateur recordists have no interests with which tape can help them or—which is more likely—they have not the imagination to see what those interests might be.
Dropout, Tape Recorder magazine, April 1970
I was a child when he wrote that and never read it, but there was something magical about going out with a EL3302 cassette recorder and bringing some of the birds back in with me from the garden. The sparrows have now left my parents’ garden in London, indeed for reasons unknown they have left the city en masse.
Sparrow calls in Ipswich
It would have been nice to have had some of those old C60s with London sparrow sounds from the 1970s. Not particularly because they would have sounded that different, probably, but as a memento of flocks long gone.
The Internet has fostered a new breed of sound hunters – and phonography, sound art and field recordists are well represented. It’s not clear to me how the BSRA lost its mojo, but I admire them for having the honesty to recognise it. I do wonder if the contest mindset is perhaps an anachronism in today’s environment – the whole open-source and mashup culture of, say, freesound is a world apart from the highly structured approach of the British Amateur Recording Contest. I wouldn’t know where to start with the latter.
The goto program for audio measurement in the Internet age is RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA). It’s not an easy program to use in isolation, and is used best with some old-skool analogue technology. In particular, it doesn’t really do absolute level in any way – everything is referenced to 0dBFS.
RMAA testing is deconstructed by NwAvGuy here. His thesis is that it is impossible to use RMAA right. particularly if you have no experience of analogue electronics and no other test gear. And I’m guilty as charged of publishing RMAA test results on the internet 🙂
It saddens me a little bit that measurement has now become go out and buy £x,000 worth of test gear, plug it it, attach to D.U.T. press the button and report the result. And if you can’t do that, well, no Audio Precision test kit, no comment. I’m not dissing NwAvGuy’s observation – it’s the loss of other ways of testing audio gear I regret. I don’t test for distortion – I scan for it. That’s because I’m testing finished gear usually for how noisy it is with mics at low levels. If distortion/frequency response looks okay/reasonable with RMAA that’s great, if it doesn’t I look for what I have done wrong in setup. Most manufacturers get the distortion and frequency response basics right, but mic preamp noise does vary because most audio recording is music and therefore has plenty of signal, so preamp noise is not usually a key parameter in a field recorder.
BBC Designs EP14/1 audio test set – a tone source and a meter
Way back when I was working at BBC Designs, using their EP14/1 test set things were a little more from first principles than ‘press the button of this expensive gear and report back’. The EP14/1 was basically a tone source and a meter with a precision attenuator in front of it.The meter was used comparatively – you would adjust the attenuators to make it read the same as a reference reading, and the wanted information was in the different setting of the attenuators. This way any nonlinearity of the meter scale was greatly minimised. Continue reading “Audio Measurements and beyond rightMark”
The smartphone/iDevice is the preferred window to the world of many people – it’s small, it’s handy, it does everything. It’s always with you. And it will do field recording, of sorts.
The internal microphone is usually a noise cancelling microphone designed to favour nearby sounds over ones far away – usually by letting ambient sounds sneak onto the back of the mic capsule to cancel out the ambient sounds impinging on the front. You, being closer to the front and shaded from the back cancel out less. Crude, but it sort of works.
Use an external microphone, not the handset one
That’s not where you want to go as a field recordist, indeed if you could discriminate against your fumbling and breathing noises you’d be better off 🙂
You want to be able to use an external mic. Omni for general run and gun ambient drive-by recordings, and a directional/shotgun mic if you want to pick out a particular birds. To use the latter well you need to be able to hear what you’re doing. Shame, is one of the big failings of smartphone audio is that your can’t record and monitor at the same time. It’s not unreasonable, you rarely want to hear that much of yourself in a phone conversation.
You need an external adaptor lead to convert the 4 pole headphone socket to a stereo headphone + mono microphone connector, these are cheap enough on ebay
You can’t do stereo microphone recording this way, it’s mono only. The input provides plug-in-power to energise electret mic capsules, because this is the typical active device in a phone headset.
Testing frequency response and sensitivity
I tested the frequency response using Rightmark audio analyser, and it looks good enough
Frequency sweep – this is good (the vertical scale is highly expanded)
The big trouble, however, is that you can’t hear anything through the headphones, so you can’t aim a directional mic. Which makes the whole rig a bit crap to use in the field, and this doesn’t seem to be fixable.
There are other bits that grate – for instance the iPod doesn’t always pick up there’s an external microphone, so you can end up viewing the internal mic instead. Then there’s the usual rattiness of apps all round, about 1 in 30 times it just hangs outputting trash on the screen. In general, as a field recorder, smartphones suck. They can be used, but anyone who has used a real field recorder will miss the positive action of real buttons, real record level controls, real metering, and yes, being able to hear what they are doing.
Wild Mountain Echoes has a good summary of the sort of hurt associated with smartphone audio recording. Dr Johnson was right. It can be done, just not well.
Big WIN in the field – live spectrum display
Being able to watch a live sonogram using spectrumview is pretty awesome, and it’s a good sonogram, too, quite well suited to general bird sounds.
The best of all worlds, use a field recorder before the iPod!
It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
Best not argue with Dr Johnson 🙂 As a recorder my iPod was flaky and with an input noise level some 20dB off what it could be and mono it’s nothing special even when it does record.
You can get the sonogram by feeding the iPod or smartphone/i-Device downstream of your field recorder – simply use a headphone y-splitter out of the recorder with one side going to your headphones and the other to the iDevice input, and set the gain of the iDevice waaaay down. You don’t have to record with it.
You now have a reliable recorder, decent mic preamps, you get to monitor what you record and if the iDevice throws a wobbly then you still have a good recording. But you how get a lovely spectrogram in live real-time. This is something that’s really excellent. In an ideal world the spectrogram would be built into the field recorder, however running it really hammers battery life so it’s good to have it optional. And it needs to be in colour.
