Bats - pipistrelle social calls

searching - third sound is a social call. Thanks to David from the Bat Conservation Trust forum for educating me as to what the strange call was

Italian Sparrow

this Italian cock sparrow is rather fine

chatty lot too -

The Italian sparrow Passer domesticus italiae is charged with being a hybrid between the Spanish sparrow and the House Sparrow we know and love (in Europe, OK!). They sound pretty much like the house sparrows I am used to, but in Lugano, Switzerland, the sparrows are much bolder than the timid house sparrows I know at home


later on, with a Lugano church bell at the end

Insects time stretched

This patch of unpromising looking waste ground next to a main road hosted a number of crickets – probably bush crickets by the sound through the bat detector compared with some on the web, but heck, what do I know, they could be something else.
Anyway, lots of these guys, and they sound a lot better to me reconverted and time-stretched

6x time stretched 5.3Mb mp3

than the original recording which sounds like mush to me

Original Heterodyne recording 2Mb mp3

Once again, detail seems clearer in the time stretched recording. The tone colour and character of the time stretched recording is much more recognisable as related to the audible sound, recorded with a standard MKE300 microphone (with traffic noise and people – this was a busy road)

Audible sound of the crickets heard in the bat detector 0.5Mb mp3

Nightjar churring over the heath

Challenging beasts to get a photo of – unusually for birds they see better in the dark than we do. I located this with a Telinga parabolic dish and then managed to line up a video cam on it set to frame-averaging night mode. They seem to be doing well on Blaxhall heath this year – there seemed to be about five individuals audible simultaneously within Telinga range.

video

Swallow sound

When one of these guys perches on the wire outside your dorm room you have to fire off a few pics – not often you get eye level with a swallow!
Nice sound too. What’s that cockerel doing going off at the end – it’s noon!

Blackbird begging sound

Apparently you only get this sound from a blackbird as a fledgeling. It is loud – this recording in picked from a 20minute segment of intermittent begging. Yet again the blackbird seems to be inviting the neighbourhood cats to come and get it!

sound

Starling Noise

You want to avoid feeding birds in a way starlings can get at it too easily this time of year.

Otherwise you get this noise, which gets a bit much. The 1min clip starts of with the friendly chirp of a sparrow, before quickly descending into a starling-fest. Starlings are communal birds that synchronise their single breeding attempt. Which means all their chicks come out at about the same time and beg for food, and the adults bring the chicks to a good food source. Don’t be that source if you don’t want to hear this…

Blackbird chipping

So you want to pack it in for the night. You’re a blackbird. You may have little ‘uns about. You know cats come out at night
So just before you hit the sack, you advertise for two and a half minutes to all the neighbourhood cats that you’re about to finish off for the day. Seems barmy to me. Mad.



Roosting blackbird

Great Tit expelling Chaffinch from tree

8am battle of a great tit and a chaffinch trying to claim the same tree. Focus starts on chaffy then moved to the great tit.

RSPB North Warren, Telinga. Windy – it was hard to keep the great tit in the boresight of the dish even though it was only 5-8m up in the tree.

Waxwings at B&Q Ipswich ·

Waxwings were reported at B&Q Ransomes Europark for the last couple of days, so it seemed worth a gander.
The flock uses a lovely trilling sound to keep itself together, it really is quite an enchanting sound. And there’s a lot of it too – they keep this up almost all the time. Not for nothing is Bombycilla garrulus so named!
Early-ish start rewarded – a whole treeful of them. Got some shots of them, and some video and sounds. The industrial estate isn’t the quietest location on earth so I had to hit this one hard with a 3.5kHz high pass filter to pick out the waxwings – fortunately their trilling is at quite a high pitch.

Sparrow Chirp

There’s something about rain that brings out the chirp in sparrows. I counted 12 of them, but the sound of this lot in the ivy and elder bushes sounds like a lot more. Why do sparrows all get up a chirp when it rains?
recorded from Maplin electret inserts on tree at 44.1kHz PCM to a PC via mic preamp. High-pass filtered from 440Hz at 12dB/octave to reduce traffic noise
A few days later I ran into a long linear sparrow colony in an old hedge by the side of Stanway burial ground. Living near the reservoir was obviously good for the health of this colony. It was a challenge to record as this was under the Heathrow take-off flight path at the time.



Sparrow colony at Stanway, under the Heathrow flight path

Starling Roost

The sound of a starling is not a song of beauty. The sound of a million birds, however, in a roost, takes on an unworldy ethereal sound with its own aesthetic…