Mockingbird in the Rain

Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) recorded at Centennial College Ashtonbee campus parking lot near Wexford Woods, 07:52 2020-04-13 (rain, handheld phone, noise filtered)

I went out for a very soggy bike ride this morning just to get out of the house. There were a few more people out than I expected, as it’s a regular work day for most people in Ontario. COVID-19 meant that most workplaces were shuttered.

Splashing through the puddles at Centennial College’s deserted Ashtonbee campus (round about here, if you need a precise location) I heard this mockingbird giving its very best performance. I only got a little over a minute of it, but in that time there was some American Robin, Gull, hawk of some kind and best of all (starting just after 40 s) car alarm.

Centennial’s got a big automotive section, and the empty parking lot’s usually full of cars. Mimus was just repeating what it usually heard. I wonder how long they’ll remember and replay car alarms after we’re gone?

clicking like the trilobite

clicks in my H120 recording
Darn it, but my iRiver, with this recent firmware upgrade, now records a click about every minute it records. See the regular peaks? It hasn’t completely ruined my recording of Of Montreal, but it hasn’t helped.

(and apologies for the relatively huge file size of the image; I’m just learning my mac-fu.)

and I thought that it’d hosed the recording of the encore by killing the wav file header. But some digging with sox parameters fixed it:

sox -V -t .raw -s -w -c 2 -r44100  broken.wav fixed.wav