At the start of this year I had the brilliant opportunity to head out to Finland with the writer Patrick Laurie and conservationist David Jarrett. David has been doing a really interesting project out there using AudioMoths to monitor curlew breeding productivity. AudioMoths have been around for a while now and are made by a company called Open Acoustic Devices. They are tiny low, cost audio recording devices and can be used as ‘full spectrum acoustic loggers’. They are often used for ecological research as they can record for very long periods of time and are very power efficient.
David sets up the AudioMoths in curlew breeding grounds and an automatic classifier is used to analyse the recordings looking for particular calls and the patterns of these calls will tell him whether the curlews are breeding successfully at a site or not. Here is an interview with David on the ‘Working for Waders’ website where he goes into detail about how he uses AudioMoths.
This trip to Finland was funded by the RiGG Trusts ‘Curlew Connections’ program and the central plan was to record some podcast episodes for ‘The Curlew Tapes’ with David and Patrick discussing wader conservation in Finland and its relationship to waders in Scotland. I would then setup high quality drop rigs in a few of the locations to try and get good recordings of some of the wader species there both to use as material for the podcasts but also for my own work. The trip would act as a chance to find out more about David’s use of AudioMoths and would also be a good scouting trip for future recording trips to the area.
I have done small amounts of work with Patrick Laurie before but this trip would be a great chance to work with him on a longer project. Patrick wrote the book ‘Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape’ and I highly recommend it. I’m slightly biased - as its about the place I grew up and offers insights into a lot of the issues I have a real interest in, but its a very well written and deeply personal book I think anyone with even a slight interest in wildlife and conservation will really enjoy.
Me and Patrick arrived in Helsinki, picked up the rental car and headed up to meet David, who had already been staying near Joensuu for a few months working on his project and scouting out possible location to put audio moths. We were staying at a cabin near IIomantsii, which is a few miles for Joensuu close to the Russian border, and David had already got a good sense of the area around and the species present (which was amazingly helpful when it came to figuring where I might setup my microphones). As well as being a brilliant tool for research projects like David’s, AudioMoths can be very useful for scouting out locations for putting larger recording rigs as they require very little power and can generate large amounts of data on a particular area.
Below is the view from the cabin -
The first thing we did when we arrived was head into the forest with David to look at some of the sites he was studying. These locations are vast, pristine, raised bogs surrounded by forest and are home to an amazing quantity of species. We arrived in the evening and I very quickly noticed the sound of black grouse lekking all around and whimbrel and curlew overhead. I could also hear black tailed godwit, golden plover, green shank, green sandpiper and many more. There were a pair of Ospreys around and black kite which I've never seen before. I was very glad I had brought my wellies as the hot weather meant that large areas of the bogs were completely covered in water from snow melt and if you stayed still for any length of time you started to sink. This made setting up mics a bit of a challenge. Below is picture of one of the bog sites showing the level of the water. Often when I returned to pick up the mics the water level would have risen by a foot or so!
They are genuinely mind blowing places and the sheer variety and density of wildlife in them was really amazing. Below is one of the podcast episodes I recorded at one of these locations in which David and Patrick are discussing curlew migration and some of the other species that live in these locations.
During the trip I setup mics all around the bog locations and out on the bogs themselves and left them running overnight. Usually this was pairs of Clippy Em172s or LOM Usi Pros in ‘tree ears’ configuration. The location lends itself well to this setup as there were small trees on all the bogs which were perfect for attaching mics either side of. Its was also very quick to setup so I could set the mics up and get out the location quickly to avoid too disturbance and having the mics and recorder up in a tree protected them from the rising water. Below is a picture of the mic setup I used
At the end of the the above podcast episode is a mix of some of the recordings taken during the night and early morning. A few individual highlights are also in the links below. As you will hear from some of the recordings below, it was actually very difficult to get any recordings without the sounds of black grouse lekking in. Almost everywhere we went we could hear them, however, our main target was curlews out on the bogs and below is a recording of some display calls on one of the bog locations.
This next recording of some ospreys which were near the edge of one of the bog locations.
Below is a recording of a passing woodcock taken a few hundred yard into the forest on the edge of the bog.
.. and finally this is a recording of some greenshanks in the one of the clearings in the forest nearby.
This area is a real gold mine for wildlife sound recordists and has such a great mix of different species. I will definitely be back with my full set of recording rigs at a later date because I think a really great sound library could be created from this location. I’d also be interested in visiting at different times of year to see how the soundscape changes when migratory species leave.