Sound Recording: May 8: 32 minutes of American Robin pre-dawn song bout
This robin was already singing strong when I woke at 4:10 and set up my Zoom H6 recorder with the shotgun microphone on the front porch. This recording started at 4:19 am when it was entirely dark, an hour and 23 minutes before sunrise, which would be at 5:42 am.
The mic was pointed toward the spruce tree in our side yard. At the start, the robin was singing in a small tree between the sidewalk and the street, which the mic picked up well, but then at about 18:30 in the recording, he must have moved to the spruce tree itself, and the sound got even better.
I wanted to keep this particular recording as natural as possible, except for deleting the lowest frequencies and lowering the volume on the frequencies well below the robin. I didn’t cut out the two cars that passed by–I thought the robin’s reactions to those disturbances were interesting.
At almost exactly the 30-minute mark on the recording, the robin switched to a further perch for barely a couple of minutes more. The end of the recording is exactly when he stopped singing in this bout, at 4:51 am, almost exactly a full hour before sunrise. No other birds were singing during this entire time.
