Northwest Soundscapes

Traveling home, I made a pit-stop to head into the forests after passing over the Cascades to record… some cascades

Traveling home, I made a pit-stop to head into the forests after passing over the Cascades to record… some cascades

My final night I set up near the same location I had the evening before, but in a higher elevation, away from the marsh and into the plateau. I’d heard coyotes coming from that direction the night before and I needed to see if I could catch a hint of them before leaving. I wasn’t disappointed, being scared half-witted by the sound that erupted in my headphones just at the moment I’d thought I’d mi...

Because of the long summer-time aridness of the refuge, vegetation is sparse. Prairie grasses and sage dominate the landscape outside of the marshy coulees. There are times in which I felt like I was out just to record wind through sage.

The Columbia National Wildlife Refuge is an important stopover for many migrating birds, including Sandhill Crane. I missed the Crane stopover for this year, but did manage to catch a few other temporary residents, including the American Bittern. I’d never heard a bittern before this week, and so I was not actually aware of what I was hearing until I inquired at the refuge headquarters. To put it...

Morning At Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, 2016-06-10 by Andy "soundeziner" Martin

The second trip of this project was to the Columbia Wildlife Refuge from June 9-12. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was certainly not prepared for the stunning natural beauty of this location. Located in the the Channeled Scablands of the Northwest, the land around this area was carved out dramatically and violently during a series of ice age deluges. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet dammed up t...

Near the main entrance I found a marsh that is popular with Yellow-Headed Blackbirds. Raucous cousins of Redwing Blackbirds, these birds sound like they should live in a jungle. The males sit on exposed reeds or tree limbs and make great clock-wise swings with their heads and wings, letting out a long “marooooooow” call that sounds like a horribly frightened house-cat. Meanwhile, the females stay...

Traveling into the refuge, I came upon a Cliff Swallow rookery. Thousands of swallows, darting in and out of the cliff, hanging in hundreds or thousands of nests. Their numbers were so great that the presence of two Red-tailed Hawks wasn’t something to be afraid of. Every time one would swoop close, the nests would empty and a great cloud of swallows would pester the hawk until it left.

Later in the day I moseyed on back into the Mt Adams Wilderness. There had been a late snow, and roads were still closed going up into the mountain, so I had to stay at lower altitudes. Still, I found a quiet place to spend the afternoon and night. Early on the forest floor was thick with flies. This is fairly common, if sometimes annoying. Without taking careful notes it can often be difficult li...

I arrived early in the morning of the 12th of May and set up near a still-water riparian area. This being the Cascade Mountains range, there was plenty of distant water wash everywhere, from small rivers and streams to snowmelt runoff. I managed to find a nice quiet area to set up, though, and spent the next 24 hours there. The non-riparian portion of the forest here was filled with typical Cascad...

Conboy Lake is not a true year-round lake, but a dense marshy area that fills with snowmelt from the end of winter throughout the spring, forming a temporary lake that slows drains off throughout the long summer. It’s an important stopover for migratory birds such as Sandhill Crane, but also provides a year-round sanctuary for all manner of creatures, great and small. From typical Pacific Northwes...

Conboy Lake is not a true year-round lake, but a dense marshy area that fills with snowmelt from the end of winter throughout the spring, forming a temporary lake that slows drains off throughout the long summer. It’s an important stopover for migratory birds such as Sandhill Crane, but also provides a year-round sanctuary for all manner of creatures, great and small. From typical Pacific Northwes...

Conboy Lake is not a true year-round lake, but a dense marshy area that fills with snowmelt from the end of winter throughout the spring, forming a temporary lake that slows drains off throughout the long summer. It’s an important stopover for migratory birds such as Sandhill Crane, but also provides a year-round sanctuary for all manner of creatures, great and small. From typical Pacific Northwes...

I arrived early in the morning of the 12th of May and set up near a still-water riparian area. This being the Cascade Mountains range, there was plenty of distant water wash everywhere, from small rivers and streams to snowmelt runoff. I managed to find a nice quiet area to set up, though, and spent the next 24 hours there. The non-riparian portion of the forest here was filled with typical Cascad...

I arrived early in the morning of the 12th of May and set up near a still-water riparian area. This being the Cascade Mountains range, there was plenty of distant water wash everywhere, from small rivers and streams to snowmelt runoff. I managed to find a nice quiet area to set up, though, and spent the next 24 hours there. The non-riparian portion of the forest here was filled with typical Cascad...

I arrived early in the morning of the 12th of May and set up near a still-water riparian area. This being the Cascade Mountains range, there was plenty of distant water wash everywhere, from small rivers and streams to snowmelt runoff. I managed to find a nice quiet area to set up, though, and spent the next 24 hours there. The non-riparian portion of the forest here was filled with typical Cascad...

I spent another weekend in the Colockum Wildlife Area, camping at the border of Coffin Game Reserve for the last week of silence before firearm hunting season begins. The elk were particularly active, perhaps they knew what was coming and were trying to get everything out of life that they could. The cows make mewling cry that I use think was from the young. The farther away a bull's bugle is hear...

I spent another weekend in the Colockum Wildlife Area, camping at the border of Coffin Game Reserve for the last week of silence before firearm hunting season begins. The elk were particularly active, perhaps they knew what was coming and were trying to get everything out of life that they could. The cows make mewling cry that I use think was from the young. The farther away a bull's bugle is hear...

I spent another weekend in the Colockum Wildlife Area, camping at the border of Coffin Game Reserve for the last week of silence before firearm hunting season begins. The elk were particularly active, perhaps they knew what was coming and were trying to get everything out of life that they could. Not long after dawn I witnessed a challenge. I heard it more than saw it, as it all took place on the...

I spent another weekend in the Colockum Wildlife Area, camping at the border of Coffin Game Reserve for the last week of silence before firearm hunting season begins. The elk were particularly active, perhaps they knew what was coming and were trying to get everything out of life that they could. A cow munched on grass near my microphone for nearly an hour. The sound was so lulling that I had doze...

Dawn near the Coffin Game Reserve in the Colockum Wildlife Area in central Washington. A herd of elk bedded down for the evening across the meadow from my tent. As the sun moved toward first light, the large males began to stir the herd, bugling out that it was time to awake. They were answered by a nearby coyote pack that was getting ready to take itself to bed. The cries of the pack and the crie...

It's been a while since I've updated everyone on The Northwest Soundscape Project, so I thought I'd upload a passage from a recent trip. This is an evening recording made at the Conboy Lake National Wildlife Refuge https://www.fws.gov/refuge/conboy_lake/ on May 13, 2016. To anyone that lives rurally around the Refuge, I'm sure this evening chorus is nothing spectacular, normal even. To a city-boy...

I was out testing a new parabolic reflector dish this morning when I got serenaded by a bullfrog at the Union Bay Nature Area. I knew there were bullfrogs in the PNW, but didn't know I'd find any in Seattle until today. It's a noisy area, with lots of plane and road traffic, so there's a light touch of noise reduction, other than that this is straight off the recorder with a HPF.

An electric arc furnace running a "meltdown" process. Think of it as a giant arc welder. Three giant electrodes, each 8 feet tall and 1 foot across, create a continuous electrical arcing for melting and mixing ingredients used in industrial steel casting. The electrodes never touch the steel themselves, and it's the radiant heat of over 2400° F that melts the ingredients! The furnace itself is 20...