HUNTING FOR NUGGETS -IN THE DARK………
Richard Lee: Unsplash
Like many naturalists and sound recordists, I love sounds coming at me out of the dark, especially if the dark happens to be a forest, and especially if the sound is a new one. At night the noise of human activity is dramatically reduced, lower temperatures reduce humidity and so sounds reach your ears with greater clarity. For the sighted, it is a time of insecurity as one of our major senses no longer functions as it does in the day, so anxiety adds an edge to things. For these reasons, plus lack of sleep, it is not an easy time to try and record sounds. This is probably why I still have a long way to go to complete all the owl recordings I would like to have.
I am lucky to live where two of Europe’s less common owls – Tengmalm’s Owl and the Eurasian Pygmy Owl both occur in the forests of the Jura. I had recorded the basic calls of both some years ago, and had written about them on this site. However, in a casual lunch with a couple of staff of the Swiss Ornithological Institute last year, I learned that the Pygmy Owl employed a different song in autumn. This is something that had completely passed me by (I don’t normally do a lot of recording in autumn, and especially not at night when my bed is a much more attractive option). But, energised by this new knowledge, I set off from mid-October to mid-December last year to see if I could track it down.
Sub-alpine owl forest set on limestone
I first scouted the forest after dark with my hand-held parabola to see if and where I could hear calls, but it was very hard going. The sub-alpine spruce forests that Pygmy Owls favour are on deeply rutted limestone karst, with usually a thick heathland ground covering of Ericaceous shrubs, ideal territory in the dark for a broken leg or ankle or, worse, disappearing down a sink hole! Also, September-October is the peak of the Red Deer rutting season in the Jura with 200+kg stags, loaded with testosterone strutting their stuff. This all led to a recording experience which was not exactly relaxed, and kept me mostly walking on the few vehicle tracks that penetrate the forest.
Forest tracks are a safer bet for walking in the dark!
So, having identified some calling locations, I also resorted to putting out unattended recorders and leaving them running overnight, in the hopes that something good might turn up close by. This technique allowed me to retire to bed in safety, but it does have the disadvantage of hours of recordings to analyse afterwards, plus not being present means that I cannot see what happened if an interesting sound event was recorded. However, after a few weeks, and some very early mornings, I did succeed in capturing what I wanted, and the whole exercise enabled me to update my Eurasian Pygmy Owl page with new recordings including my primary target:
Unattended recorder - naked
But the story doesn’t end here. In working through the static recordings, I began to detect another call which I was sure I had heard before. In the past I had attributed this call, rather like a medium-pitched squeal, to female Red Deer alarms – this based on one single sighting some years ago. Now, I was picking them up almost every night, and sometimes several times during the night. I collected them together and listened carefully; they were very variable in tone, timing etc, and I was quite uncertain what they were. After some literature searching, I began to suspect it was the call of a Tengmalm’s Owl that I had never attributed before. This was confirmed after consulting with other recordists, and enabled me to update my Tengmalm Owl page, revising some old mistakes and adding in the new calls.
Unattended recorder - in disguise!!
It also made me go back a decade or so to some of my earliest attempts at unattended recordings. In fact, I found both these “new” Pygmy, and Tengmalm’s Owl calls in my old sound archives. Both labelled “unknown” and then forgotten. But things had changed: since capturing those sounds, two significant books have been produced. Magnus Robb et al wrote “Undiscovered Owls” (and is now available on line), and Erkki Korpimäki and Harri Hakkarainan from Finland, wrote a monograph on the Ecology, Behaviour and Conservation of the Boreal Owl. Both sources didn’t exist in the days of my first recordings, and were vital to helping me now unravel what was going on with the behaviour of these two species.
It tells me that, despite a lot of activity, we still have much to learn about nature, it is an on-going story of discovery. It is vital to keep up conservation efforts, despite the mighty challenges, as there are golden nuggets hidden away not only in our notes and archives, but out there in the wild still waiting to be discovered - even in the dark!
You can hear more of these results and explanations by clicking Eurasian Pygmy Owl and Tengmalm’s Owl
