Last night Martin and I shared a Sussex Common with several Nightjars and a horde of voracious midges. It is quite enthralling, waiting for the sun to go down and to hear the first churring. Unfortunately last night we also had a helicopter fly by, a barking dog and in the distance an outdoor concert with the obligatory bass thump. Never mind, at around 2145 the first faint sounds were heard. Soon a closer bird flew by and perched for us and then commenced a fairly loud churring session - wonderful!
The photographs were taken in near darkness - for the photographers - Canon 7d Mkii coupled with a Canon 300mm F2.8 and 1.4 extender - hand held. The remarkable thing is that I managed to get any sort of recognisable shot as I had the camera set to ISO 10000 and a shutter speed of 1/30 of a second.
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| Taken at 21:56! |
Being so close afforded the opportunity to record the churring, flight calls and wing clapping that are characteristic of the bird.
Sonogram of the first recording, sorry the blog doesn't run to synchronised sound and vision.
Press play for the audio track
For the Geeks. Olympus LS11 with Sennheiser Me66/K6. Post processing in Audacity. Sonograms in Raven Lite.
This is a second recording of the same bird, this time with a high pass filter applied at 320 Hz, helping to remove some of the ever present aircraft noise. The swatting sounds remain, I am afraid the midges were getting through my defences.
As my seven readers will know, Sunday is not a usual birding day for me. However, today had some pretty strong extenuating circumstances to allow an exception to the rule. The weather was clear and cool overnight and promised bright sunshine through the day. So at five bells into the morning watch I set out for the Sussex commons. On our secret birding map there is large X and the caption below states "Here be Dartfords". How could you doubt the veracity of such a map as, before the sun had risen above the trees and touched the tops of the heather, the first bird was perched in front of me, albeit at a distance. I then constructed a makeshift hide, up sun of the likely spot, and patiently waited for the next subject to arrive - and it did.
Having captured two birds I thought I was on a roll, how wrong can you be, a rather cool easterly breeze sprang up and the birds disappeared. I continued to wait patiently, the hide must have been effective as at least three dog walkers passed by and failed to detect my presence. Neither did the dogs, which perhaps says something for my new deodorant.
As the deck watch indicated six bells of the forenoon watch there came a steady procession of cyclists in yellow jackets, families dressed overall in dayglow fluorescent lycra of both lurid pink and yellow hues and even more dogwalkers. Time to set a course for home.
