But customers often ask; what is the difference between these recordings – surely a beach is a beach? So this is a good opportunity to discuss the variety of moods that nature presents on our wild coastlines.

‘Call of the Ocean’ was our first coastal album, recorded at various locations from Phillip Island in Victoria to the north coast of NSW. It features a diversity of recordings, taking the listener on a walk along an ocean beach, up into the dunes and coastal woodlands, and onto rocky headlands.

Here is a short audio sample from the album

During the course of the album you will hear waves washing up on a sandy beach, gurgling in and out of rockpools, breaking on distant rock platforms and, more spectacularly, whooshing from a blowhole. The calls of shore birds like Silver Gulls and Sooty Oystercatchers are heard against the surf.

The album wanders from shoreline into dunes and coastal hinterland. Dawn birdsong is heard in heath country, with grassbirds, coucals and wrens creating a delicate chorus, while from overhead come the calls of a majestic pair of White-bellied Sea Eagles. Drifting across a coastal freshwater lake comes the distant chiming of Bellbirds, and later the soft, braying calls of Fairy Penguins carry on the night breeze as they come ashore to their nesting burrows.

So ‘Call of the Ocean’ is quite a diverse coastal album, blending wave wash and birdsongs into a portrait of our wild coastlines.

‘Surf, Beach and Shoreline’, by contrast, features pure wave and surf sounds.

It consists of three extended recordings, each taking around a third of the album time. The first is waves breaking on a sandy beach, rolling in from the ocean and hissing up on the golden sand. The second comes from a beach of smooth ocean-worn cobbles. As each wave breaks and recedes, the stones can be heard softly rattling with the retreating waters. The final recording comes from a late afternoon on a sheltered beach, with small waves, their fury already spent, finally collapsing on smooth sands.

Here is an audio sample.

‘Surf, Beach & Shoreline’ is a recording for those who find the sounds of the sea relaxing and soothing.

The same can be said of ‘Moonlit Pebble Bay’.

This recording came about unexpectedly. Night is a good time for recording the ocean, as any sea breezes have often abated, allowing clear recording. And of course waves sound the same by day or night – or so I thought.

One evening I was at Mimosa Rocks on the NSW south coast, recording around the rockpools. After several hours I was getting sleepy, and sat down on the cobbled beach of a sheltered bay to listen before heading back to my camp. Maybe it was just me, but I found the lazy sound of the waves, washing into the bay and up onto the stones, deeply relaxing. Each wave would wash in, starting at one end of the bay and break cleanly around to the far side. Sometimes waves would arrive in small groups, with interludes of gentle lapping between.

‘Moonlit Pebble Bay’ contains the hour-long, unedited recording, just as I had heard it that evening. It is a beautiful meditation, which we’ve included in our ‘Nature at Rest’ collection.

Listen to the audio sample.

The more I record by the seaside, the more I come to appreciate the subtle sounds of the ocean, and find ways of capturing that beauty. A beach is not just a beach!

‘Call of the Ocean’, ‘Surf Beach & Shoreline’ and ‘Moonlit Pebble Bay’ are each available as either CD or for digital download, directly from our website; www.listeningearth.com

What is the most beautiful songbird in the world?

If we mean ‘musical to our ears’, then surely one of our favourites would be the Malabar Whistling Thrush, Myophonus horsfieldii, of India. Also known as the ‘whistling schoolboy’, this bird has the most haunting and tuneful of songs – it is indeed like overhearing someone whistling to themselves as they walk along a jungle path.

Our first encounter with this songbird was completely unexpected. Sarah and I were at the beginning of our first field trip to India, and the most of the birdsong we were hearing was exotic and unfamiliar.

We had chosen to visit Cotigaon Wildlife Reserve in Goa, on India’s Malabar coast. Cotigaon is an extensive evergreen forest nestled among the foothills of the western Ghats, seasonally drenched by the monsoon off the Arabian Sea. It is a truly beautiful place.

Although we didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, it was also an easy park to access. Due to a low population of large mammals such as elephants, it was relatively safe for us to find our own way around, even after dark. We simply hired a pair of scooters, and that first morning set off at 4am to ride into the core forest area where we had identified a likely recording location; a footpath leading through a dense part of the forest.

I left Sarah to await the dawn while I set off on foot with my recording gear. Everything was silent, with just a pattering of dewdrops falling from the canopy. Not far off, a softly raucous call broke the stillness, a sound that I would soon come to recognise as a Jungle Owlet.

I set up my microphones, and put on my heaphones, with little idea of what to expect of this exotic new environment. You can perhaps imagine my feelings; a mixture of cautious awareness and expectation.

I was listening intently. Another Owlet called, and the soft susurration of crickets permeated the air. Then the most inexplicable sound arose in the dark. Someone was whistling a tune… slow, soft, immensely beautiful, and with a carefree sense of aimlessness about it. It seemed to just hang in the air like the humidity itself. Listening, I was dumbstruck, in a state of suspended animation.

It lasted perhaps a minute, and before it had finished, another tune began from behind me. In all I think there may have been three birds singing that first morning, each moving from one songperch to another, so the forest seemed filled with sweet, sad melodies. Then they fell silent again.

I had just heard the Malabar Whistling Thrush giving its predawn song in its favourite haunt, the dense undergrowth of India’s evergreen forests.

I continued recording as the dawn arrived and the forest came alive with a wonderful diversity of other birdsong; Flamebacks, Hornbills, Yellow-browed Bulbuls, Drongos, Fulvetas… Particularly delightful were the groups of tiny and iridescent Sunbirds that darted among the canopy and understory.

That morning’s recording can be heard on our album ‘Sunbird Forest’. But while Sunbirds were numerous at Cotigaon, it is the Whistling Thrushes who are the real stars of the album. They feature on the opening track, which I’ve entitled; ‘Melifluous’, as I can think of no better word to describe the song of the Malabar Whistling Thrush, surely one of the most beautiful songbirds in the world.

Listen to a sample from ‘Sunbird Forest’ – the Whistling Thrushes can be heard during the first minute or so.

The nature sound album ‘Sunbird Forest’ is available on CD or by digital download from our website: www.listeningearth.com

The Painted Button Quail, Turnix varia, is a native quail of the drier eucalypt forests of eastern and southern Australia. Whilst they are widespread, they are quite uncommon, and their camouflage plumage makes actually seeing them in the bush a rare treat.

Our first encounter with them was fifteen years ago, whilst sound recording for one of our early nature albums; ‘A Morning in the Australian Bush’. In the Capertee Valley of NSW I recorded what I thought to be a pigeon, giving a series of resonant booming calls from low bushes. We didn’t actually see the bird, but it sounded so like the Common Bronzewing pigeon, that it never occurred to me to question. It was only a year later, after we had completed and published this album, that a naturalist friend confirmed that what we’d recorded was actually a Painted Button Quail.

Here is that recording of the Quail, as heard on the album. (The accelerating call, gradually rising in pitch, is diagnostic. Also to be heard in this sample is the clear, descending whistle of a Horsfield’s Bronze Cuckoo)

A few years later we bought a bush block and built our home in central Victoria. Imagine our delight to discover that we had these delicate little birds resident in the bushland around us. Not only in the forest, but sheltering by our back door, trotting past our office window, or taking a short cut through our car port!

It was our first occasion to really observe them, and what beautiful little creatures they are!

A female ‘PBQ’

Usually seen in pairs, they are quick and nervous in their movements, darting off or taking wing at the slightest disturbance – which is very wise for a small ground-dwelling bird! In Australia we have several introduced predators that these quail have had to learn to live with; foxes and cats being the most threatening. Add to that the distressing fact that over the years we have found almost as many dead quail by the side of rural roads as we’ve ever seen alive, and we have come to feel these birds are hanging onto existence by sheer tenacity.

For several years we enjoyed seeing them around our home and bush, and then we stopped seeing them at all. We put this down to either predation or drought. For years now, south-east Australia has been in the grip of one of its worst droughts on record. The unprecedented bush fires in Victoria have made headlines around the world, the bush is dry and colourless, and urban water storages are at all-time lows. Not seeing our lovely quail was just another depressing sign.

But two months ago, they reappeared! We first noticed them in a disused garden patch near the house, and most mornings since we can see them among the dried grasses that have taken over the old garden beds.

Male Painted Button Quail at a nesting scrape

This morning I spent some time quietly watching them feeding and scuffling around. They have a delightful habit of digging little nesting scrapes in soft earth, and one can see where they have been by the lunar landscape of delicate depressions they create. They are so animated, like little feathery balls on yellow legs. So quick and restless are they that getting a photo without blur is not easy! At one point I must have moved slightly, and they suddenly scampered off into the undergrowth. In doing so they slick their feathers down, no longer plump little feather balls, they run head outstretched like arrows to safety.

So a plump quail is a happy quail. Hooray for tenacity!

The nature sound album ‘A Morning in the Australian Bush’ features a beautiful diversity of Australian birdsong, and is available on CD or by digital download from our website: www.listeningearth.com

It is quite common for them to do this on well-illuminated moonlit evenings. Not only Magpies, but other birds such as Willy Wagtails, are well-known for this behaviour. What is interesting with Mapgies is that they have quite a different call nocturnally than their usual day-time calls.

Magpies are regarded by many as having one of the most beautiful songs in the bush, a liquid series of rippling notes, sort of an extended warble. Being a bird found throughout the continent, their calls can be thought of as a characteristically Australian bush sound.

Magpies have thus featured on several of our albums, such as ‘A Morning in the Australian Bush’, ‘Favourite Australian Birdsong’ and ‘Birdsong Virtuosos of Australia’.

Nevertheless, we’ve had requests from listeners who were hoping for an album dedicated just to Magpies – a celebration of Magpies.

At first I thought such a project could be an overdose of Magpies! However on listening through some of our recordings, I realised that they have such character and diversity in their songs that they are effortlessly entertaining.

When I came across the collective noun for Australia’s Magpies, I new I’d found the ideal title for the album: ‘A Madrigal of Magpies’. Very evocative, appropriate, and preferable to the northern hemisphere’s ‘murder of magpies’ (entirely different species of course).

One of the recordings we chose for the album features the Magpie’s nocturnal song. It is much slower and lazier than their diurnal song – as nocturnal birdsong often is (listen to the 3am Pied Butcherbird song on ‘Spirit of the Outback for instance). But the Magpie’s nightsong is also structurally quite different too. Why this is, and why they sing like this at all, I don’t know, but their lazy warbles on a moonlit night are a pure delight.

Here is a sample from ‘A Madrigal of Magpies’ to listen to.

It features four excerpts edited together. The first minute or so is from a morning in bushland, and you can hear the Magpies’ typical daytime call, including some nice warbling among a chorus of other birdsong. The second is the nocturnal call (with some White-plumed Honeyeater dawn calls), and you can hear how lazy and relaxed it is compared to the diurnal ones. The last minute or so comes from Magpies recorded near suburban Melbourne and in an open rural district.

‘A Madrigal of Magpies’ is available on CD or by direct digital download exclusively from our website: www.listeningearth.com/albums/40MadrigalMagpies/40MadrigalMagpies_Album_info.htm

The nature sound album ‘A Madrigal of Magpies’ features not only Magies, but a diversity of beautiful Australian birdsong, and is available on CD or by digital download from our website: www.listeningearth.com

Several years ago, Sarah and I journeyed to the Australian outback, hoping to record the calls of Cockatiels.

We were not having any luck finding them (they are highly nomadic birds, and seemed to have departed the area a few weeks previously). However we did discover something unexpected – a group of ephemeral lakes in the desert, filled with water for the first time in 40 years.

The parched and flat expanses of the Australian outback may not seem the kind of place where one expects to find lakes. But when water arrives, it brings the dry landscape to life in a most spectacular way.

Birdlife, particularly waterfowl, is attracted to these inland water bodies to breed. They arrive from possibly thousands of kilometers away in response to rainfall, and we found these isolated lakes to be refuge for a huge numbers of ducks, coots, black swans, maned geese, dotterels and cormorants.

We nearly wouldn’t have known about the lakes at all. It was the local landowner who suggested we may find them interesting for our sound recording, and directed us to them through the flat, scrubby country.

We set up camp near the shore of Pine Lake, one of the smaller ones of the group. Being limited in size, the birdlife was concentrated, offering better opportunities for sound recording than larger, open water locations.

During the day, waterfowl could be seen resting across the lake. I tried making some recordings, but the birds were largely silent. It was at only night that they really got vocal.

This surprised us at first. One thinks of birds roosting at night, at least being quieter and less active. But water birds are the opposite, they really party after dark!

Throughout the night, ducks, geese and swans could be heard calling in the still air, their voices echoing eerily across the landscape. Every now and then, wings could be heard overhead as ducks took to the air or flew in from nearby lakes, alighting with a soft splash. Along with the waterfowl, nocturnal crickets chimed quietly, and small bats could be heard echo-locating for insects over the water’s edge. Tiny dotterels patrolled the shoreline, occasionally giving their characteristic ‘ratchetty’ calls.

I had set up my microphones on the water’s edge, and ended up leaving the recorder running for many hours. As Sarah and I sat in the dark, we found ourselves being gently lulled by these hauntingly beautiful sounds.

We found out later that we were not the only ones to find this symphony of waterbirds restful.

Meeting up again with the owner, he shared his delight in these nightsounds too. Despite a challenging life on the land, he had a deep appreciation of nature. He described how it was only the second time in his life that he had seen these lakes fill, and how his family would drive out to them after dinner, to sit quietly in the moonlight listening to the ducks with a glass of wine in hand.

Here is a short sound sample of what we heard on those evenings. The full recording is featured on our album ‘Meditation at Pine Lake’.

‘Meditation at Pine Lake’ can be purchased on CD or as a digital download from our website: www.listeningearth.com

So perhaps you can understand why for us, the thought of these beautiful little birds in captivity is saddening. Nevertheless, we can appreciate how pet birds bring joy to so many people.

Over the years, we have heard from many owners who report that playing our birdsong recordings seems to be beneficial for their feathered friends. Anxious birds were observed to calm down when they heard other birdsong, and lethargic ones seemed to become active and engaged, some singing for the first time.

Here are some examples of what we’ve heard:

“Since its mate died a year ago, I could see our pet Budgie was bored and under-stimulated. I have been trying to liven it up a bit in many ways (music, diet, toys…), but without much success. I bought your ‘Spirit of the Outback’ CD and played it back to our budgie. It went crazy instantly and started eating more, flying more and socialising more with us!!! By any chance, would you have any other recordings of budgies in any situation? Thanks for the good work, you have made a major impact in a life (of the budgie!).”

“Do you have, or can you recommend, a recording of budgies in the wild? Something my daughter can play for her birds to help them have that “part of the flock” feeling?”

At first we were surprised at these dramatic changes in behaviour, but it is easily understandable. Social bird species, such as budgies, are often favoured for aviaries because we enjoy watching them interact. With all birds, but especially these social species, vocalising and communicating is a vital part of their survival and wellbeing. So it makes sense that hearing the sounds of their own kind should have a profound impact on their mental and emotional wellbeing. For a budgerigar, silence must be very disturbing.

We can perhaps understand what it may be like for them, because humans are pretty social too (most of us . For instance, when we’re on our own at home, many of us will put the TV or talkback radio on in the background. We may not be watching or even listening all that closely, it is just comforting in some way to have a voice in the background. Birds are likely similar, and this is why they respond to birdsong in their immediate environment.

For many years, we have been recommending our ‘Spirit of the Outback’ album for budgie owners, as it has some nice calling from them (plus it is a great listen all round). But we felt that something ‘more budgie’ would be appreciated. Hence (and after many requests from bird owners!) we have created an album specifically for our feathered listeners. For their wellbeing.

“Happy Budgies” is recorded in central Australia – budgie country! It features the sounds of wild budgerigars interacting contentedly in their natural environment, plus a diversity of other outback birdsong. We have avoided any distress calls, or calls of obvious predators. It begins with the sounds of a flock of budgies waking in the morning; the chatter of the communal roost, then flying off to feed, calling on the wing and still communicating amiably. Later we hear quiet, contented subsong, and the sounds of preening and group interaction.

Why the title “Happy Budgies”? Well, for us, seeing them in the wild brings happiness. I don’t know whether wild budgies really are ‘happy’, but they often seem to be, they appear to be having a great time. And ultimately, we hope that it makes your budgie happy to listen to these sounds.

Have a listen to a sound sample from the album.

“Happy Budgies” is only available for digital download from our online shop.

(We anticipate that some people may prefer to have this album on CD, for instance so they can put it on loop from their CD player whilst out during the day. At this stage, we have no plans for it to be available in retail outlets. However we can supply it on CD – contact us for details. Alternately, one can always burn the digital download version to CD-R at home)

In late September, Sarah and I undertook a short (but adventurous!) field trip to Mutawintji National Park in outback NSW (more later!).

We arrived home just in time for a gathering of local members of the Australian Wildlife Sound Recording Group. A small mob of us southerners convened at the Clarkesdale Bird Sanctuary near Ballarat, for a weekend of camping, sound recording and workshopping, somehow also fitting in the group’s AGM.

The previous week had presented some wet and wild weather, but fortunately the weekend was still, sunny and calm – absolutely perfect for nature recording.

The location I chose to record was a creek-line called ‘The Bird Paddock’. Dense shrubs lined the watercourse, with huge eucalypts towering overhead. The wattle and grevilia were in full bloom and birds seemed to be everywhere. Wrens, fantails and scrub-wrens flitted around the understory, while rosellas, cuckoos, treecreepers, sitellas, shrike-tits, kookaburras and brush bronzewing pigeons could be observed higher in the treetops. Occasionally corellas or cockatoos provided a noisy fly-past.

I am delighted with my recording from the morning. As it was a semi-rural area, I anticipated some local road traffic or other interference, but the Sunday morning was quiet and the birdsong rich. Eventually we hope to release the full recording as an album, but for the time being, here is an excerpt for your enjoyment.

Spring morning at Clarkesdale Bird Sanctuary, Linton, Victoria.

The recording we made of the butcherbirds in Ormiston Gorge features on the opening and closing tracks of our album ‘Spirit of the Outback’.

In the outback, birdsong can often be heard all night, especially around the time of the full moon. I have never heard this phenomenon anywhere else, day birds typically being silent during the night hours. But in the outback, magpies, butcherbirds, honeyeaters and willie wagtails can often be heard singing across a spectral landscape. And what makes their songs particularly haunting is that, as the birds rest, their night calls are languid, slow and unhurried.

This nocturnal birdsong obliges the nature sound recordist to remain on duty all night!

Sarah and I were camped near Ormiston Gorge, a magnificent, kilometre-long gap in the Macdonnell Ranges, west of Alice Springs in central Australia. During the day it is a popular spot for locals and tourists, and the large permanent waterhole at the entrance of the gorge is a favourite place for picnics and swimming. At night however, it is deserted, except for the pied butcherbirds.

I drifted up from sleep around 2.30am, and could hear a butcherbird singing down at the gorge. Pied butcherbirds have the most sublime song; a series of fluted musical tones, woven into a repertoire of short melodic phrases that are often sung in duet. On this night however it was only one bird, and it was roosting right across the waterhole from where I set up my microphones in the moonlight.

The pure tones of its melodic voice echoed up the gorge, adding a huge reverberance in the stillness of the night. From far away up the gorge, another bird was also singing, its voice floating distantly. I was privileged to a beautiful performance that night – I have not heard a butcherbird sing so wonderfully before or since.

The butcherbird was the diva, but not the only voice to be heard. As you listen to the recording, you can hear crickets calling from the reeds around the waterhole, and a small bat flies past with an audible chipping. A pair of hoary-headed grebe float on the water, calling occasionally, and a black-fronted dotterel patrolling the water’s edge takes to the air with its characteristic flight song. On the rock slope opposite, a group of black-tailed rock wallabies feed, their movements dislodging small stones every now and again. A barn owl flies unseen overhead, its call echoing against the rocks. Tree frogs begin croaking noisily at the far end of the waterhole, and later a hooded robin, which is a species only heard in the small hours of the morning, begins calling nearby.

As I said, it was a magical occasion. If I could give one example of how musical nature can be, I would choose this recording.

The following evening I hoped for a repeat of the concert, but the butcherbird was calling from a different roost, much further up the gorge. I recorded anyway, but with a mild sense of disappointment. It was only later when I listened back to that second recording, that I heard how evocative it was. It was peaceful and still, distant butcherbird calls giving a palpable sense of space, one of those rare moments when you feel you can actually hear the landscape itself.

Thus we chose to bookend our ‘Spirit of the Outback’ album with these two unique recordings. You can hear a small sequence at the beginning of the sample for the album, but of course you’ll wish to enjoy the complete recording on the album.

‘Spirit of the Outback’ is available either on CD or for digital download from the Listening Earth website.

And finally – please – if you ever go to Ormiston Gorge, camp for an evening and go down to the waterhole in the wee small hours of the morning. If you are fortunate, you may hear one of Australia’s most beautiful songbirds performing in one of nature’s most magnificent concert halls.

Situated on the edge of the great western desert, Uluru is not only a wonderful place to experience the life of the desert, but ‘the rock’ itself also creates and protects its own range of micro-habitats for plants and wildlife.

Which is what our nature sound album ‘The Experience of Uluru’ is all about.

The first sight of Uluru appearing on the horizon over the red sand dunes is one not many visitors will forget. So also is being out on the dunes and viewing the first light of dawn on the rock. So this is where our album begins, with birdsong rippling over the dunes at dawn. Crimson chats, fairy wrens, honeyeaters, woodswallows and willie wagtails all contribute to a delicate and ephemeral dawn chorus.

The next track continues with morning birdsong from woodlands of mulga, eremophila and desert grevilia that grow on the surrounding sand plains, and features the voices of western bowerbirds, rufous whistler, crested bellbird, pallid cuckoo, tiny diamond doves, and the ’sparrows of the outback’; zebra finches, which the aboriginal people call ‘nyi-nyi’s (it’s easy to hear why).

From here we move closer to the rock itself, to the groves of ancient bloodwood trees that grow around its base. On track 3 you will hear a soft chorus of cicadas, the first gentle breeze of the morning ruffling the treecrowns, and the lovely trilling calls of rainbow bee-eaters as they glide and swoop after insects.

We follow the breeze back out onto the sand dunes for the next track; ‘Wind sighing through Desert Oaks’. These stately trees are in the casuarina family, and like their coastal cousins, the slightest movement of the air has their unique hair-like leaves sighing softly. It is an evocative and restful sound, and may remind you of the ocean. Which is poetic in a way, as early European explorers to the inland were drawn by the hope of finding a vast inland sea in the centre of Australia. Instead, they found a sea of sand, with trees that murmured like the surf. On this track you will also hear birdsong such as thornbills, woodswallows, and the distinctive ‘telephone dialling’ call of red-capped robins.

Back at the base of the rock, we stop by Mutijulu waterhole, a sheltered wetland area at the base of the rock. Water draining off the rock trickles into the pool, and a grey-headed honeyeater calls from the surrounding bloodwoods.

Nearby is Ikari Cave, a horizontal gash in the rock, home to bats and a colony of fairy martins. I love this recording, but obtaining it took some patience. Drifting vehicle noise was amplified by the shape of the cave, and the only time I could be assured of quiet was the half an hour of dusk, when tourist traffic was parked over at the other side of the rock viewing the sunset. Fortunately, this coincided with the time the martins returned to their roosts and the bats began stirring for the evening. A brown falcon can be heard calling distantly from the sandplains.

In the late afternoon light, the whole area of Kantju Gorge is bathed in a vibrant red glow reflected off the face of the rock. Here mole crickets call from grasses, and the songs of birds such as the pied butcherbird, black-faced cuckoo-shrike, and yellow-throated miners echo off the rockwalls.

‘Valley of the Winds’ takes us to Kata Tjuta (The Olgas), a remarkable rock formation about 40km west of Uluru. If you’ve been there you’ll know the high domes of red rock, separated by impossibly narrow ravines. This recording was nearly not made, because pushing the record button did not seem a worthwhile thing to do at the time I was there. The wind was howling, and few birds seemed to be calling at all. Eventually I found a relatively sheltered spot, and became aware of the sound of wind roaring against the rock walls high above me. It was such a continual roar as to be almost subliminal. Once I began recording, the sparse sounds of birdsong – grey thrushes, a kestrel, mistletoebirds and a bronzewing pigeon – echoing in the ravines created a compelling acoustic picture of this unique location.

We conclude by returning to the base of the rock at dusk, once again stopping by Mutijulu waterhole. We hear a sound not many visitors experience, that of a chorus of night insects and the tapping of shoe-maker frogs. After the busy activities of the day, a peaceful tranquility descends upon the rock. Finally we hear a chorus of insects in the grasses as the last glow of desert twilight fades against the rockwalls of Uluru.

Here you can listen to a sound sample from the album.

‘The Experience of Uluru’ album is available on CD or for digital download from the Listening Earth website.

I found myself reflecting on this recently, during a 4-hour recording session in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. After several days of poor weather – windy, cloudy and squally – the sun was finally shining and the birds were out and about, vocal and active on that spring morning. My microphones were set up overlooking a densely wooded and sheltered valley, with tall eucalypt trees reaching skyward past the sandstone escarpments that hemmed the valley. Lyrebirds padded around on the forest floor, and golden whistlers, rose robins, currawongs, black cockatoos, thornbills, crimson rosellas, plus a diversity of honeyeaters all contributed to the birdsong. A breeze still occasionally ruffled the canopy of the trees, and every now and then flocks of wandering silvereyes would fly through, twittering on the wing.

I had set up my equipment in the darkness before dawn, and the recorder had been running continually since. Fortunately I’d planned ahead and chosen a comfortable place to sit quietly, where the first rays of the sun would catch me and warm my back.

I found myself reflecting on how I was now recording uninterrupted ‘long takes’, whereas years before I would only switch on for the ‘highlight moments’. Certainly those highlight recordings could be fantastic. Our early albums are composed of them; such as the dingoes or pied butcherbirds on ‘Spirit of the Outback’, the sooty owls or golden whistler duet on ‘Tall Forest’, or the opening soundscape on ‘A Walk in the Rainforest’. Each of those albums I listen to now with great affection.

I realised that recording those highlights is akin to taking photographs; an attempt to capture the special moment. But of course nature’s sounds form a continuum throughout the day, and I have come to appreciate the slow pace of that symphony. Like a classical symphony, things happen and develop over longer periods of time, and to fully absorb them you have to sit and listen. But even the longest classical symphony is still limited to our human attention spans, while nature’s symphony is shaped by the rhythms of daylight hours and temperature variations, by the flow of weather and, on a broader scale, the seasons themselves.

To capture this slowly evolving music of nature, suddenly even a whole hour’s album program seems like a ridiculous limitation! But I guess I’ll have to accept that as a limitation of my art.

So I have chosen the ‘highlight hour’ of that morning in the Blue Mountains for our album ‘In a Sheltered Valley’. You will hear lyrebirds scratching around near the microphones and singing, successive waves of silvereyes flying through the valley, and many birds coming and going on their rounds. Relax into it, it is quite meditative. And if you can listen with your back to the sun, that would be perfect!

Listen to a sound sample of the album.

‘In a Sheltered Valley’ is available exclusively as a digital download from our Listening Earth website