Audio recordings of birds

[Shortsighted]

A few days ago when I heard the song/call of a Carolina wren, which captured my attention and directed me off the beaten trail and deeper into the woods, its clarion signature song was the only reason that I was able to see this wren and thankfully get a chance to photograph them (since there was both a male and a female). This got me thinking about audio recording in nature. I suppose that I could have taken a video with my camera but I simply didn't think of it at the time. I was never very clever. Besides, the mic on the camera is probably not the best tool to capture a singing bird in that it has no directionality. From my limited knowledge of audio recording (that's the TransAtlanticGoose's regime), I would imagine that a "shotgun" mic with a wind muff would do the trick, much as a parabolic dish + mic used to serve that role decades ago. So, I was wondering whether any member of this forum routinely captures audio recordings in nature and how they might go about it. I'll be surprised if anyone responds to this question, or really any question. I'm guessing the smartphone is the tool-of-choice for everything except making an omelette. No hurry to respond, just take your time cuz I'm not holding my breath. Oh ya, then there is the whole business of audio editing software. Eeek! Everything gets complicated.

[TransAtlanticGoose]

I generally don't reach for a shotgun mic when recording nature, preferring minimally directional mics instead (just like our ears), so as to try and capture exactly what I'm hearing as closely as possible. But I suppose if your goal was to isolate just a bird call, with a minimum of distracting nature, then a highly direction mic might help you. That said, nothing beats a good stereo recording of nature and a pair of headphones, where the brain serves as the isolating tool, filtering out the distant drone of traffic and the rustling of leaves beside and behind you, so that you can focus on the bird call coming from one direction alone. (Analogy: You know how you can (usually) understand the conversation of the person across from you in a very noisy bar/restaurant? Try plugging one ear. Now how well can you understand them? - Lip-reading not allowed!)

As for gear to go about doing it, my preferred setup includes:

1.) A low-noise, battery-powered audio recorder: I use a Zoom F3 Field Recorder. It's very small and light, provides +48V for condenser mics, and records 32-bit audio files, so there are absolutely no gain controls to set incorrectly. (ie. there is more dynamic range in a 32-bit file than any mic can produce, so hard-wiring the device gain at it's lowest-noise setting is ideal). As a bonus, if you plan on doing very long nature recordings, it can be additionally powered by a USB powerbank.

2.) The quietest, most neutral-sounding mics that I happened to already own. (I used to work as a sound engineer, so I had a few to choose from). In this case a pair of Lewitt lct 550's (I know large-diaphragm mics are not conventional for nature recordings, but they have zero self-noise, and I already owned them.)

3.) Some kind of stand/tripod/tree-attaching-device to hold the mics, and preferably the recorder off the ground, + a bar that allows you to hold, and position, the mics at a distance apart roughly equal to the width of a human head, or perhaps slightly more. This is especially important if you want it to sound natural on headphones.

4.) Find some piece of nature with a minimum of background traffic noise. You'd be surprised how difficult this is to find. Our brains filter it out most of the time, so you don't notice it's constant presence most of the time.

[Shortsighted]

By golly, I was about to say all that. I was also going to mention something about audio editing but then realized that I don't know how to do it. I suppose that there is a relatively inexpensive stereo pic-up microphone assembly that could be connected to a smartphone, which is what most people probably use in the field. Not that I would really know anything about smartphone deployment for field recordings, not having one, or the other. A guy that I ran into outside of a park works for the Ministry of the Environment and he told me that he used bird recordings on his smartphone to attract certain birds in the field. He downloads the recordings from the net. He suggested that I try it. When I told him that I don't own a smartphone he laughed out loud, put his arm around my shoulder and exclaimed that he absolutely loved that I was old school and didn't succumb to the invasion of privacy inherent in a smartphone. He said that he wished he could manage it.