Jul 03 2024 5 mins
This is a nearly hour-long dawn chorus recording I made at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on May 26th of this year. It captures an expansive sound portrait, positioned at the perimeter of the lake basin, recorded with very low self-noise microphones.
The Malheur basin continues to experience drought conditions but rebounded somewhat in April of this year, with the lake swelling to over 30,000 acres. The water wasn’t really on display in late May. The once glassy surface had subsided below the vegetation in most of the basin, but you could hear its lingering presence of insofar as the wildlife was there, well distributed, greeting the morning sunrise. We hear the sparkling song of the Western Meadowlark, the ecstatic Willet, and a flock of White-faced Ibis fly by in the foreground, along with a panoply of shore birds and grassland migrants in the distance.
Enjoy!
