British wildlife recordings

Long description:

Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.

This selection of sound recordings of all kinds of wildlife from around Britain is from the Sound Archive's unrivalled natural sounds collection. It includes recordings of great scientific, cultural and historic interest. Made for the most part in nature reserves and wild locations, the recordings often have special significance in documenting ancient habitats that are gradually vanishing. Some of the species featured have already become extinct - the red-backed shrike from Norfolk, for example, and the Worcestershire marsh warbler.

The recordings were captured by three wildlife enthusiasts working between the 1960s and 1990s: Howard George Phelps, Lawrence Clive Shove and Aubrey John Williams. Apart from a small fraction of the Shove collection, which was published on a set of discs in the mid-1960s, none has previously been published.

Howard Phelps was an experienced all-round naturalist who developed his field skills during a childhood spent fishing, bird nesting and enjoying other country pursuits in his native Wiltshire. He recorded in many parts of England, Scandinavia and Spain. Lawrence Shove, who was born near Dartmoor, became one of Britain''s best known nature recordists in the 1960s. His recordings of birds, mammals, amphibians and insects were made in a great variety of habitats in England, Wales and Scotland. John Williams worked mainly in the Home Counties and Gloucestershire.

Making the recordings required much patience, intimate knowledge of natural history and the use of specialised equipment. A certain amount of luck helped since weather, man-made noise and other factors could all too easily detract from the quality of a recording. All were made with portable open-spool tape recorders. Many sounds were captured using one of the field recordist''s most useful tools: the parabolic reflector. This device effectively brings the subject closer by using a parabolic dish to focus distant sounds into a microphone set at its centre - the equivalent of the photographer''s zoom lens.

A sense of place is strongly evoked by many of the recordings, which are often documented with precise locations, dates and times of the day. The cries and calls of some species lay claim to a particular resonance with local or national culture.

The ''crek crek' of the corncrake is an enduring symbol of the crafting communities of the Outer Hebrides, where the islands' meadows are the summer home of two thirds of Britain''s corncrake population. Breeding colonies of the gregarious Atlantic grey seal are a tourist attraction on the Pembroke coast and its islands. The sounds of dogs herding sheep evokes hilly Welsh farmlands, while English downlands are conjured up by the skylark whose song was an inspiration to that most English of composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Wildlife has even had its influence on place names and dialects. For instance, Dunnockshaw in Lancashire means 'a small wood or copse frequented by Dunnocks' and Ousden is 'a valley of owls'. On the coast of East Anglia, ships'' foghorns are known locally as 'fog bitterns' after the booming call of the bittern.

Some habitats continue to dwindle under the pressure of development: peat bogs, old Caledonian forest and lowland heaths are all slowly disappearing. In others, wildlife populations have increased: on the Scottish moors, for example, as a consequence of the extensive re-planting of forests there. Every shift in the balance alters the sound of the countryside. The recordings selected here include not only the familiar noises of country gardens and suburban parks, but also the increasingly elusive cries of some of the country''s rarest creatures. Together, they paint a fascinating sound picture of Britain''s ever evolving landscape.

All recordings on this site are governed by licence agreements.