Back in mid-August, a member of the local Greener Holbrook climate action group had commented that they had enjoyed the sound of grasshoppers at All Saints church on a sultry Sunday afternoon. This sort of instant, local information is an amazing resource to have for a sound recordist, and having previously recorded the early morning sounds of the church yard in January and the bee hives in May, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to make a different recording at the location.
At around 11am on the 19th of August I entered the churchyard and headed to the area of grasshopper action mentioned on Facebook; an area of the church yard left un-mown to encourage wildlife. The weather report had promised a mainly sunny day, but with quite a robust breeze and before long I could hear some faint chirps and clicks coming from the long grass. I positioned my equipment and sat down to listen.
Within minutes a loud roar could be heard approaching as a low flying plane crossed from south to north overhead. Thanks to the positioning of the village under an east-west flight path, the sound of aircraft is a constant feature of my recordings. In the early days of the project, I would try and record in the short gaps between the planes passing overhead but these gaps were often too short and I figured that the presence of them was an accurate recording of the village soundscape. What made this plane different was its direction, a quick look on Flight Radar revealed that this plane was an oil spill response unit based in Southend, and was on the way to Newcastle on a training mission. Its low altitude was deafening and rendered the first section of my recording unlistenable.
Throughout the ten months I have been recording I have not managed to work out if the natural world is bothered by the sound of aircraft, and once the flight had passed over my own ears began to focus on the grasshopper once again. There was a steady drone of buzzing and the occasional grasshopper call along with the faint rustle of the dry grass in the breeze and another ever-present sound of the wood pigeon.
Researching grasshoppers later on that day I discovered that they are more sonically active in the afternoon, and the hotter and sunnier the conditions the better, but the recording below captures the sound of village insects during only free time I had available on that day.
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