Baby woodpeckers?

I have recently discovered a beautiful pocket of woodland at the fringes of the Harris Gardens in the grounds of Reading University and I wanted to go there to listen to the sounds of the birds who are all very busily chirruping away just now with their babies and their nests. I found a nice clearing, resonant with the songs of birds, but then became aware of something – amplified through my microphones – high up and high pitched in the trees. Luckily I was recording using Chris-Watson’s pro-tip to attach two omni-directional microphones to a coathanger. This gives you a lovely stereo impression of ambient sound, but it also means that when you hear a difficult-to-access sound that is high up, you can wedge your coathanger on a stick and poke it up to the source. That is what I did, standing in a clearing still and near to a tree, watched over by two anxious woodpeckers. I think this sound is what I heard – the sound of their babies in a nest inside the tree. Isn’t it amazing? I love it when the process of recording a sound highlights something I had not previously heard – once I’ve heard it through the headphones, it’s there forever in the soundscape.