The other day I went out for a walk and I noticed a flock of Black-Headed Gulls roaming about and being annoying, as they generally do. Whenever I hear these creatures I (1) inevitably think of Angry Birds and (2) make yet another mental note to someday go out with the purpose of recording them. For some reason seagull (and especially black headed gull) sounds are quite difficult to come by, and their calls are excellent for designing monsters.

This time I cut my walk short, went to a shop close by to buy a loaf of bread and went back to the park where the monsters flocked. There was a bit of wind, and traffic filtered through from the roads close by so I had to try and get the creatures to call as close to the recorder as possible. Luckily they aren't too shy, especially when food is involved so this was not that difficult to accomplish.

I positioned the PCM D100 facing towards a less noisy side of the park and set the input levels to 4 out of 10. I then broke the loaf into bits that I threw in front of the recorder's mics. In a fraction of a second I was surrounded by a flock of angry birds that did their best to either snatch a bit of bread or prevent others from doing this themselves. Good times!

The recording is of decent quality given the location and weather. It probably can't be used for research purposes, but with a bit of cleanup it can definitely be layered with voice or other creature calls for sound design purposes. Here is a selection of clean calls at 24/96 quality, both at normal speed and pitched down by an octave:

Field recording tools of the trade

At the lower end of the price spectrum, field recording equipment will yield relatively similar results. A few dB of self noise won’t make a huge difference if the recordist hasn’t mastered the other tools of the trade, the ones that can’t be bought. Let’s examine some lesser known but rather more important tools that are sure to improve your field recording practice.

Introduction to Freestyle field recording

Freestyle field recording is a flexible approach to recording nature and wildlife sounds outside of the studio or any controlled environment, developed by George Vlad. While traditional methods are prescriptive and rigid, Freestyle field recording encourages deliberate experimentation and a very organic workflow.

Listening session at the House of Lords in Westminster

I recently received an invitation to play some of my soundscapes and to tell stories about conservation. While there’s nothing unusual about that, the setting was definitely novel for me.

A collection of Owl sounds

Owls are awesome and worth learning about. What better place to start than a curated selection of owl recordings, captured by your favourite wildlife sound recordist!

The 2025 Soundscape Fund

How can field recording make a difference for conservation and environmental causes? I get this question a lot, and one of the answers is here. Once a year I team up with Thomas Rex Beverly and Andy Martin to raise money for environmental NGOs.