Thursday 19 April 2018

Sound Recordings - 18th and 19th April

With very little time and lots of work to catch-up with between my two China trips I have not been out birding and I feel like spring in the UK is slipping me by. I have taken to carrying my sound recording kit with me when carrying out bird surveys and here are a selection of recordings from the 18th and 19th April.

I added a number of sound recordings to this post linked to uploads at the Internet Bird Collection (IBC). With the subsequent transfer of data from IBC to the Macaulay Library the links to these became broken. I have therefore subsequently uploaded these sound files to eBird and the recordings for Guildford can be viewed here and those for Dorchester can be viewed here. I have retained the sonograms from these recordings on this post.

This Blackcap near to Guildford, Surrey was energetically singing and calling with the two often mixed together. Singing from deep within a Blackthorn thicket, this was one of my first migrants of the spring. The top recording is a sequence of song while the spectrogram shows three 'tack' calls followed by a burst of song.



This Coal Tit near to Guildford, Surreywas singing emphatically from a stand of pine and came to investigate me as I wandered by. The top sonogram is a song sequence while the bottom is a burst of seven calls showing the broadband 'pit' element of the note and the near constant frequency of the 'chu' element.



This is the song of a Goldcrest near to Guildford, Surrey. The top recording is a full song sequence while the lower sonogram shows a single song sequence followed by a single call. A lot of energy goes into this seemingly simple song.



This is a Great Spotted Woodpecker drumming on a dead oak snag at the edge of its territory in an oak woodland near to Guildford, Surrey with a Blue Tit singing in the background.

This Chiffchaff near to Dorchester in Dorset was avidly defending its territory against other Chiffchaff in the area. The top recording is a long song sequence while the image below shows the structure of the notes used in the song - the 'chiff' being higher frequency with a maximum intensity at around 4.6Khz while the 'chaff' is lower at around 3.9Khz.


This male Yellowhammer near to Dorchester, Dorset was perched in a hedgerow giving an undulating call sequence rather than its classic 'little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese' song.