[LAU] Recording of a 'natural' talent.

Folderol folderol at ukfsn.org
Wed Jul 20 21:02:27 UTC 2011


Warning! This file is about 12M and the audio runs for 8 1/2 minutes.

I recorded this in 1982, by hanging out of an attic window at about 4:30am.
This was as close as I could get to 'Blackie' who always sat high up in the
same chestnut tree. The time was dictated by the need to get zero traffic
noise. Even then I was at this every morning for about a week!

The MIC was a bog-standard Unidyne B plugged straight into a Casio DA-7
portable DAT machine (cost an arm and a leg in those days). I was getting a bit
paranoid about losing this so took a Wave copy from the machine in the late
1990s.

Blackie is actually a copyright infringer. He copied the most notable part of
his song from a friend who used to whistle that handful of notes frequently -
to everyone's annoyance. However, we forgave Blackie as he'd been hearing it
virtually from hatching. You see, he'd fallen out of the nest and Terry (same
one as I've mentioned previously) hand reared him. Also, I swear that at a
couple of points he's actually laughing!

A final twist was that a couple of years later we saw and heard several young
blackbirds with a remarkably similar song.

http://www.archive.org/download/BitsAndPieces/Blackbird.mp3

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.


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