Long Time No See

I am Back, and well worth a bookmark.
Look See.
http://vimeo.com/fotopia/liverpool

# nine Dream

My Neighbour Mr Robin

It started off with my putting bread out on the windowsill after breakfast for the birds, especially when the squirrel destroyed yet another bird feeder. Since then, even though I have replaced the seed feeder, a couple of beautiful robins still visit my windowsill and come right up to the window and look through into the room. I'm sure they have worked out that if I see them I usually go and cut up some bread or put out some seed on the sill.
The bread is of course seeded wholemeal nicely coated with peanut butter, which reminds me I have to go to the shops. I thought I was training birds to trust me but it seems they are training me.

Here's a little treat. I took this video at the David Byrne concert held in Liverpool on the 3rd of April. I enjoyed the concert immensely and the two hours just flew by, we wanted more. I was sitting right on the front row so it was not too difficult to set the camera up, on my knee, but I concentrated more on being there, than trying to get a great video, hence the wobbles.

Another Blackbird Song

Another little snippet of the Blackbirds song. this time with the waveform. I think I'll make another video soon with slightly different editing of the .WAV file. This Blogger video does not seem to be loading very well, it is only a small file so this should not happen. I may try an alternative method.
Stay tuned.

The Blackbird Sings

I've mentioned before how it is a great occasion for me to hear the Blackbird resume singing for the first time in the year. This usually happens in February or March in the North West of England where I do be. It's like the first Snowdrop flowers appearing at the end of Winter or the first buds of blossom at the beginning of Spring.

I haven't any "proper" sound recording equipment so I've been using my little Panasonic camcorder to record any interesting sound and extracting the audio from the resulting video file. That is what I have done with this recording made this evening (Wednesday March 4th) Here is the Blackbird Song in an MP3 format (3.6MB) I may make a Flash video of it showing the waveform display, if I can figure out how to do it.

Over the years I've noticed that the song develops as the year progresses. From a stuttering, though still beautiful, collection of doublets, triplets and assorted calls to a full bodied fully formed song.
The Blackbird will listen to other male Blackbirds and copy a segment of that birds song if it likes it, and incorporate that into its own song. I've heard them practice and develop little riffs over the course of Spring and Summer. Just think of that for a few moments, the little fellah sits there on his favourite perch checking out his rivals song. There must be a process in his mind that critically analyses the song and then goes "Oooo, I like that, I can work with that". He then weaves it into his own song and hopefully attracts a female with his artistry. So in this way the female too has a say as to what is deemed to be a "good" song.

I've been playing around with Windows Movie Maker after finding one of my favoured videos has gone missing from utube. This is the result.
I'm hoping I am not breaking any copyright by publishing this. There are hundreds of similar videos on utube and the like which do not appear to have fallen foul of the law. Still I think I'll investigate more. We don't want to be breaking laws now do we.