Field report—Tivoli Bays wetlands
This evening after putting our baby down and just before losing the light, I drove in to Tivoli Bays, a ~1,500-acre wildlife reserve not far from our home here in upstate New York. I took a small recording setup (a drop rig like those used by George Vlad) consisting of a Sony PCM-M10 recorder, MicBooster Clippy microphones and some Windbubbles. After finding a spot that sounded interesting, I positioned the mics on the underside of a wide hand railing to provide some protection from rain, put the M10 in a dry bag and hit record.
I didn’t capture a full nights audio because I forgot to put a microSD card in the recorder and so was limited to the 4GB internal memory of the M10. Even so the resulting recording is crisp with a good stereo wideness (I used a tree ears setup), but there is a lot of noise pollution from the surrounding area. Given I only captured the couple of hours between 8 and 10 p.m., my hope is that later at night there will be less of this and that I can capture a clean soundscape.
Luckily Tivoli Bays is only a short distance away and I can go back to record the ambience for a second time. Better to make this mistake now than at a location that is less easily accessible. Very frustrating nonetheless!
Report notes
- Date:
- 2024-08-14
- Time:
- 20:30-22:30
- Location:
- Tivoli Bays wetlands, Tivoli, NY
- Recorder/settings:
- Sony PCM-M10, gain 6, limiter off
- Sample rate/bit depth:
- 96/24
- Microphones:
- MicBooster Clippys (stereo pair), tree ears configuration
- Comments:
- Forgot memory card in M10 and only captured ~2 hours of audio. Gain was set too hot and some clipping occurred, aim for -12dB peak level in future. Clear recording through the Sony M10/Clippy combo with pleasing stereo image. Not a lot of interesting wildlife at this time in this location—soundscape dominated by chorus of insects.