The Lammermuirs are a range of hills around 40 mins drive from Edinburgh near Gifford. I am always looking for new places to go recording and this spring I was recording a lot in Blinkbonny wood near Longyester. There is a track which runs past Blinkbonny wood and is the start of a great walk which you can do to Lammer Law and when I was recording woodpeckers at Blinkbonny wood I heard a large number of red grouse calling at around 5.30am .
I have never managed to get a good close perspective recording of red grouse, only very distant ones, so I decided to come back and try to get a decent recording over the next few days. I arrived at the start of the track just past Blinkbonny wood at around 3.30am parked the car and headed into the hills. I set up my mid-side rig on a 30m of cable and sat behind a small rise and listened. Luckily as I was in a valley there was very little noise from the farms nearby.
Soon I started to hear large numbers of Lapwing or Peewit as they are sometimes called. I could also hear red grouse, curlew, snipe 'drumming' and later on skylarks started to sing. There was an amazing mix of species and I heard around 20 male grouse calling from around the valley I was in. Really great to find another good place to go recording near Edinburgh! Below is a spectrogram of a clip of the recording I made with grouse calls on the left, lapwing in the middle and snipe 'drumming' on the right, and below that is the recording itself (Best listened to on headphones)
Here's another recording made on a slightly more windy morning. Nice close up snipe at 30s and 1.34.