I love recording these sound clips. If you have a smartphone, chances are you have a voice memo app. These are pretty good for recording high quality sound.

Now I’m getting into the habit of recording like this I’m finding myself listening more to what is going on around me, in a very present way. At the moment, this is usually on the way to and from work – which is pretty cool – in the morning, I leave at around daybreak, so there is usually a symphony of birdsong to wake me up; in the evening I walk through a small area of parkland that is filled with the sound of frogs calling into the dark. Really great.

In this clip, it is early morning on an August day. The pied currawong (a large, black and white crow-ish bird native to Eastern Australia) have returned to the Melbourne suburbs where it is (relatively) warmer than their usual hangouts in the mountains. A bit later in the year they will breed here. Right now they are forming large flocks and this cacophonous soundscape is the result!