Flock

With artist Kathy Hinde and a small group of early morning listeners we had an amazing experience of hundreds of thousands of starlings leaving their Somerset roost at dawn. Moving, spectacular, stunning ... what more can I say.

Twitchr Starling Walk

I'll be helping out with this walk to listen to the starling murmurations out on the Avalon Marshes in Somerset on 19 November.

Minute of Listening

In autumn I'll be working again with Sound and Music to help roll out a trial of their new Minute of Listening project in Cornwall. A fascinating idea, and the sort of thing I would have loved at school!

A thousand voices

Thanks to everyone who came on our night time wander to listen to the thousands of birds roosting at high tide at Dawlish Warren. Sitting quietly in the dark at the roost sharing the sound of oystercatchers, brent geese, curlew, wigeon and dunlin all jostling for space was really wonderful, perhaps amplified by the remarkably high spring tide and the perfect cool stillness of the air.

I'll be thinking about one more sound walk as part of Aune Head Arts Flittermice and Hoots series in the next few weeks ... and will try and put the field recordings into a podcast to try and hint at the sound experinces we've had.

Dusk at Dawlish Warren, 28 October 16:30 to 19:00

As part of Aune Head Arts Flittermice and Hoots series I'm leading an evening sound walk to identify and listen to the migrant wildfowl for which Dawlish Warren is so well known. If you’re interested in making sound recordings, bring along a mini-disc, digital or other recording device as there will be many opportunities for capturing the evening’s soundscape.

The City Rings

This sound project, linking selected schools in Belgium, Spain, Denmark and UK is coming to an end. The results from Cornwall are documented here.

The poetry of the earth is never dead

Due to poor weather we resheduled our walk in search of crickets and grasshoppers and other small sounds to the week following the advertised date. Fortunately it was second time lucky as six of us enjoyed a warm still evening's wander around Orley Common.

We were rewarded with the quiet sounds of dark bush crickets and the considerably louder reeling of the UK's largest insect, the great green bush cricket. Alongside these we also recorded the echo-location of bats transposed through a bat detector and numerous calls of birds, including some very active jays and the pre roost calls of blackbirds.

Finally, in darkness, we picked our way back to the car park, our path faintly illuminated by the natural limestone paving.

The following week we gathered again, this time at Aune Head Arts studios at Dartington. There, using laptops and the studio's very wizzy Macs we started to edit our collected audio in what will be a series of short podcasts for Aune Head's website. More on this in October.