Last Sunday I took my lock-down exercise in the wood at 5am so I could record some of the dawn chorus. The first recording I made included owls and is in the previous post.

The following shows the sheer variety – all the birds are just waking up and want to be heard. How many can you identify?

Here’s one where the main performer is a song thrush, at times (including right at the beginning) giving a fair impression of a green woodpecker. A couple of times you can here a real green woodpecker in the background, objecting to the imposter?

Also to be heard in there are chiffchaff, pheasant, wood pigeon, crow, blackbird, wren, robin and I’m sure others.

This one is a very tuneful blackcap:

In the following recording you can also hear a blackcap with another insistent call/song in the background which I can’t identify – if you can or have an idea, please post a reply:

Warning: technical footnote!
Info for those of a technical bent: I use audio-technica AT829 stereo microphones with a Sound Professionals SP-SPSB-1 microphone power supply and an iAudio7 mp3 recorder. This may sound impressive to the uninitiated but is really quite unsophisticated, particularly as I carry it around in a small tatty-looking plywood box. I post-process the recordings using an audio editor to amplify the signal and apply some noise reduction. It’s unfortunate that the noise from the motorway is way too easily picked up, and all the more surprising for very early on a Sunday morning during lock-down.