Peace on Cranbrook Down — Flies, with linnets and grasshoppers

Peaceful natural soundscape on Cranbrook Down, high up above the Teign Gorge, with flies and at times the odd bees or bumblebees fussing around on some close-by flowers, and also a little linnet song and contact calls, and the odd quiet grasshopper. There's also a little distant farm machinery noise at times — much but not all of which I cut out for the processed version used in Nature-Symphonies.

I made this recording on late morning of 14 July 2024, on the open ground on the uppermost part of Cranbrook Down, high above (south of) Fingle Bridge (Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK), late in the short final ascent from the woods to the summit area (the Cranbrook Castle ancient hill fort).

Linnets were a disappointment for me, because I was largely too late in the morning for their singing. They were singing persistently as I came out into the open ground, and just into the recording, and then there was almost no song — only their (still very pleasant) contact calls once in a while.

This and the next flies soundscape upload are put here as a prelude to a short series of Nature-Symphonies using one or other of them.

This recording taking place.

Techie stuff:

Recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was placed on a Sirui carbon-fibre tripod.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield.

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