I love swans. I just do. My heart always skips a beat when I see them on a lake. I love their wild sounds, their warbled cries, whistles, and bugles. This recording was captured today, January 14th, 2025, and is two hours in length (for paid subscribers). It captures the sound of swans, geese and ducks.

Here we have Virgina Lake. Few people know it by name. It’s not listed on most maps. It is the centerpiece of Wapato Access Greenway (or Wapato Park, for short) on Sauvie Island, just north of Portland, Oregon:

In my experience the Tundra Swans settle in here best on foggy winter days. They don’t tolerate noisy humans on the shoreline. It’s hard to get close enough to them to get a photo with good detail.

Juveniles have dusky brown heads and necks:

Tundra swans look very similar to Trumpeter Swans, but are differentiated by their higher pitched bugle calls, and a yellow teardrop on their bill (often hard to spot in the field).

Like almost all of my recordings, this has been edited to sound as pre-industrial as possible, without sacrificing fidelity.

If you like the sound of swans as much as I do, here’s a recommended list of previous recordings:

Oaks to Wetlands Trail Soundwalk

Ridgefield Swans

Swan Songs

That’s all for now. Be well, friends.

Hello Friends. It’s been a while since I made a Soundscape podcast. I guess I wasn’t feeling the wind in my sails on this particular front.

I found this recording and post in my “drafts” just now, so I’m winging it out there. Maybe it will jumpstart my workflow over here. It’s timely, given we’re still exploring Sauvie Island.

Enjoy!

Here we have a 17 minute soundscape recorded in Jasper, AB, Canada off trail 14a near the Old Fort Point Rd. It captures the sound of the braided, glacial Athabasca River, and various birds along its shores. You’ll hear White-winged Crossbill, Dark-eyed Junco, Spotted Sandpiper, Pine Siskin, Common Raven and more.

A download is offered to paid subscribers below.

This is a nearly hour-long dawn chorus recording I made at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on May 26th of this year. It captures an expansive sound portrait, positioned at the perimeter of the lake basin, recorded with very low self-noise microphones.

The Malheur basin continues to experience drought conditions but rebounded somewhat in April of this year, with the lake swelling to over 30,000 acres. The water wasn’t really on display in late May. The once glassy surface had subsided below the vegetation in most of the basin, but you could hear its lingering presence of insofar as the wildlife was there, well distributed, greeting the morning sunrise. We hear the sparkling song of the Western Meadowlark, the ecstatic Willet, and a flock of White-faced Ibis fly by in the foreground, along with a panoply of shore birds and grassland migrants in the distance.

Enjoy!

Back on Sauvie’s Island, about 10 miles north of Portland, OR, there’s been a significant turnover. Gone are the water birds; the manifold swans, ducks and geese. Well there’s still some geese, but only a fraction of the number on hand two months ago. And, there’s probably some ducks; Mallards, Wood Ducks, and Gadwall mostly. Many with ducklings in …

Two days ago I was in Austin, TX sitting on a lounge chair looking up into the cloudy sky with my family, moments from totality. We made the trip south for my nephew’s wedding, and stayed in town for the big celestial show. So there we were, observing the moon inching its way—from our perspective—across the face of the sun. The cloud breaks actually enhanced the elongated experience of the partial eclipse phases. The wisps of vapor that floated in the atmosphere between the sun, moon, and us added yet another layer. Here is the scene leading up to totality in a time-lapse:

I had placed two audio recording devices within a couple hundred feet of our viewing spot. One captured a small crowd of 20-or-so people on nearby patio, and the ambient sound all around. Another was trained on the nearby lake and wooded area that played host to an active wildlife population.

The soundscape you are hearing is the blend of the two. I made an effort to keep them discernible: the wildlife signal is dominant in the left stereo channel and the crowd signal is dominant in the right channel. This plays out over 20 minutes with totality occurring at the midpoint (10:00).

Our view of totality was almost entirely obscured by passing low clouds. We got just a brief glimpse of the corona filtering through a small cloud break. Here is a clip of the moments just after totality:

Reflections

* The crowd audio gives a good play-by-play of the climatic surprises and upsets. The wildlife soundscape tracks the stages of the eclipse loosely.

* It is true that birds go quiet in a total eclipse, as do frogs, it seems. Here, an Eastern Phoebe is the last to catch on, and a Canada Goose is the first to break the silence. The goose is followed by tentative Northern Cardinals, White-winged Doves, Carolina Chickadees, crows, and cricket frogs.

* Unbeknownst to me, country music was introduced into to the wildlife soundscape by what I have to guess was the fisherman I observed in a kayak. This was an unwelcome surprise to me, but I find myself warming to it!

* My guess is if you asked anyone in the crowd if they noticed the train or airplane or motorcycle pass by, they wouldn’t be able to recall. As a recordist, hoping to get some special “tape”, I was all-too-aware of these incursions.

* It was impossible for me to conceal my disappointment in not getting a better view of totality, even though the other aspects of the experience (the swift transition to twilight, the dip in temperature, the change in the soundscape, the crescent shaped patterns in the shadows) remained enchanting. Listening back, I hear that I was not alone. Brief squeals of delight are interspersed by chagrined peals of nervous laughter.

* My wife gracefully maintains that the experience was perfect, and she was not the least bit disappointed. What does this say about me, that I was hoping for something more akin to what we witnessed in 2017? I still wonder.

I like to pair my Soundscape programming with my Soundwalk episodes when I can, but a bum XLR cable and an unlucky site choice made my fixed Timothy Lake shore recording last fall a failure. This is common. Most field recordings that I make are unspectacular. That’s why I keep at it. Almost daily.

Another thing I like to do is share something recent. So here’s a recording I made last week in Pacific Beach, WA from the porch of a cottage my family had the pleasure of staying at. It’s a 87 minute dawn chorus audio bouquet of downspout drips, rain showers, frog choruses, Pacific Wrens, Song Sparrows, American Robins, Stellar’s Jays, and the distant Pacific Surf. It evolves pretty nicely, I think. Enjoy!

Recorded with a stereo pair of Rode NT1s in an ORTF array to a Tascam DR-100 mkIII.