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: