This is the sound of a log cutter being run from a vintage tractor with logs being cut one by one. Each year in the Autumn, many forest folk (me included) start to turn their attention to preparing a decent-sized log stack ready for colder evenings indoors around the wood burning stove,
I like the way this particular sound generates its own natural, rhythmic mechanical pattern.
Enjoy an early morning in New Forest woodland, immersed in the beautiful sounds of Spring birdsong. Twenty-three minutes of natural soundscape brought to your favourite armchair.
Take the sound of bees on flowering honeysuckle, and slow them down to a quarter of their normal speed, and suddenly we can enter a whole new and unusual soundworld. The bees sound just like little Spitfire propeller aircraft coming in to land on the flowers, and the birdsong takes on a strange tropical quality. Listen to my piece called “Busy Bees” to compare how the bees normally sound.
Soundscape piece. The sound of summer bees on yellow honeysuckle flowers in a New Forest village garden. For an interesting different perspective on this soundscape, take a listen to my “Slow Bees” piece, where you can enter into an unusual soundworld!
This is actually one of our famous New Forest ponies recorded close-up, munching grass. Did you know that the ponies are often referred to as the architects of the forest, because by doing all this munching, they keep the grass looking short and mowed? Without them, much of the forest would soon become an impenetrable wilderness.
The song of the blackbird is beautiful, and provides us with some of best melodies of all the garden birds. The individual that I recorded here is a real virtuoso with a gift for improvisation too, producing a mellow flute-like song at a nice, leisurely pace from the apex of a New Forest village roof in late Spring. The song comprises soft, clear and liquid notes that, to me, sound very pleasant to listen to, especially as the phrases never seem to repeat exactly the same twice.
Wednesday morning, 6.30am in the middle of May, and it’s dawned still and clear on the outskirts of this New Forest village. The early sun is rising up through the oak and beech trees, casting long, dappled shadows on the dew-covered lawn. Outside this open window, birds are singing enthusiastically greeting the advancing dawn.
Now and again a car hisses by on a nearby, quiet forest road, sounding like an ocean wave running up the shoreline and then fading away. Up above, sharing the blue sky with the sun, airliners hurry along at 30,000 feet or so, leaving fluffy, white vapour trails and adding their distant, rumbling voices to the soundscape. Listen for a while…
Imagine relaxing with a favourite book, or taking a picnic beside one of The New Forest’s mesmerising and beautiful meandering streams. If you can’t be there in person, then perhaps this may serve as the next best thing. Absolutely designed to be dreamy. Drift away….
The beautiful sound of mid-morning Springtime birdsong in a New Forest Village.
Deep in the night, when the air is quiet and still, the eerie sound of distant trains sometimes floats through the forest. This soundscape was recorded near Brockenhurst at 11pm.
New Forest Sounds 