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(Pages have changed: FZ30 camera stuff is now in the Equipment section here.) | |||||||||||||
17 August 2006 I was curious to come across this item from the BBC Radio 4 website yesterday: "Geoff Sample has spent years recording the sounds of the countryside. ... hours sitting in the woods 'thinking' his way into the world of the Tawny Owl." Geoff Sample is a well-known bird recordist (his work includes the admirable Collins Guide to Bird Songs and Calls), and the extract appears to have been part of programme notes written for an Open Country interview with BBC presenter Richard Uridge. That specific extract is no longer there, so without listening to the broadcast itself one isn't able to discover more. Anyway, I had no idea Geoff Sample was so into tawnies. Now I have this picture of him going into a meditative trance, recorder and microphone forgotten at his side, among ancient oaks as he seeks the door to the enchanted world of owls. As a victim of this magic myself, I tell you that owls should come with a health warning attached to a tail feather. They're beguiling, compulsive, utterly addictive. Once you get involved it's not easy to set them aside. If there's another bird that has this power to fascinate I don't know it. I momentarily fantasised that I might have had something to do with Sample's interest! Highly unlikely -- for one thing the programme went out in February 2005. But in 2004 I emailed him, curious about the "squeakers" that are heard in quite a few of his recordings, and he asked me to send a sample of my own as he didn't know what they sounded like and wasn't aware that he'd been near so many hungry tawny fledglings! Geoff Sample's site, with cd catalogue, is at http://www.wildsong.co.uk. I have Songbirds, Birdsong in Britain and Dryad: Woodland Soundscapes. All highly recommended, and more titles are available now. If you don't have any bird cds you really should. Especially if you have a pet bird -- they love them. While we're on it, Sittelle (France) has an extensive bird cd catalogue. On their main page click on "Product Catalogue" in the side panel to display the various categories. The link I've given is the english version of the site. A couple of other European retailers with sites in english stock Sittelle's cds but I don't have the urls at the moment. The eleven or so cds I have are all excellent quality. When I last counted they had over 40! The only cd I know that's exclusively given to European owl calls is Chouettes et hiboux de France et d'Europe, by Nashvert Production. Take this link to L'Oreille Verte/Nashvert, and either type "chouette" into the search box (gets you straight there), or click on "Catalogue", and when prompted click on "GUIDES animaux" in the Menu box above. About 4 clicks down the illustrated list of cds that appears will bring you to the owl cd. Worth having, though the spoken commentary and notes are in french only. All you really need do is look up the english names of the 13 owl species featured (and named in french and latin) -- or just guess them from the illustrations in the notes! While we're on the subject of sound recording, The Quiet American is a wonderful site. Aaron Ximm, the site owner, had the simple and quite brilliant idea of inviting people to submit one-minute samples of recordings made on vacation. To hear these go to "One-minute vacation". As of today there are 240 such "vacations" spread over the five years since the project was started. That's four hours of some very interesting listening! It's fascinating to be transported to so many different parts of the world by these sound bites, most of which are of high quality. And anyone interested in recording equipment will find it a hugely useful resource as a wide variety of recording setups are represented -- in most cases details of the equipment are given in the notes that go with the recordings. A new recording goes up every week. Highly recommended.
19 August Mentioning Lawrence Poh's work when writing up my new camera led me to revisit his site after a long gap. It is really sad to see that his death in 2004, which I hadn't known about, brought an end to what was already an outstanding set of albums of Malaysian and Australian birds. I think we first discovered him in 2002, when our own interest in birds and bird photos on the net was taking wing. His excitement and enthusiasm for what he was doing -- he was apparently the first person to have the idea of putting a digital camera to a spotting scope -- communicated itself through his comments and often brilliant results. If you don't know about his site it's well worth a visit (home page here). The galleries of non-bird pics also demonstrate his gift for photography, that feeling for when you've got something visually and aesthetically pleasing in the frame and the ability, patience and experience to make it happen more often than not! So many of his pics are absolute gems. And this page gives a simple demonstration of the sheer power of digiscoping -- which basically is no more than photographing birds through a telescope. (Spotting scopes are portable refracting telescopes that birders have used for years to watch birds at distances and/or magnifications that are beyond the reach of binoculars.) | |||||||||||||
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Lawrence Poh in the early days of digiscoping, here apparently simply holding his Nikon Coolpix 990 against the eyepiece of a Leica Apo-Televid spotting scope! Rather the way I do my recordings . . | |||||||||||||
powered by owls | |||||||||||||
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