To gather an understanding of which birds are active at this time of year I took a trip to the RSPB location in Geltsdale. The photo you can see above is the view from a bird hutch where I recorded some sounds for just over 10 minutes and heard an impressive range of birds, some I had not heard of before. For my final composition, I intend to include recordings from morning, afternoon, and evening; the sound clip I have uploaded would count for the afternoon as it was recorded at 12:26pm, on my phone.
While I believe most of this recording will not be used in my composition, it has helped me understand more about the birds that are active during this time of day in the north of England. One bird that I have noticed is very active throughout the day is the Eurasian Robin, while it is often thought of as being a bird most active in winter, it is constantly singing throughout most of the day.
I have continued to look at the shapes that the Merlin app provides for different bird calls and I find it interesting to see the shapes it provides. The Eurasian Curlew for example, is simply a horizontal line that is slanted upwards. This is drastically different to the Canada Goose which has a short and staccato call, which Merlin provides a pretty vertical, and thick line. Birds such as the Robin or Chaffinch have more variety in their calls due to the wide range of pitch in their calls.
A lot of the calls have given me inspiration for how I could phrase my spoken narrative. The variety within each bird's calls and the amount of birds active gives me a lot to work with. Calls such as the Curlew allow me to have slower repeated words, possibly to add emphasis. Versus the Common Chaffinch or the Eurasian Wren which have more melodic songs to work with, for longer phrases.
