Show Notes
I recently made some wind protection for my SAAM Microphone in order to get better recordings on windy days. Several people remarked that it looked like Cousin It from the Addams Family, so that's what I've started calling it. I went to Medicine Lake, in Modoc National Forest, on a very cold and windy day in order to test it out, and these are the results.
These are the raw files straight from the recorder(Zoom F6) with no editing of any kind. All I did was apply a five second fade to the beginning and end of each clip and combine them into one audio file.
The first minute and a half is the mic with only the wind protection I got from the manufacturer, and the second minute and a half is the mic with Cousin It(the wind protection I made). I don't have an anemometer so I can't say exactly what speed the wind was blowing, but I can say that it was blowing pretty hard. I'm guessing the stronger gusts were 25-30 miles per hour(40-48 kilometers per hour). The spot by the lake I did the test was surrounded by Lodgepole Pine, you can clearly hear the wind blowing through them in the background.
I was pretty happy with how it worked, Cousin It did a great job of protecting the mic from the wind. I look forward to using Cousin It to get recordings for you without fear of the microphone being overwhelmed by unwanted wind noise.
More from Sound By Nature
This was recorded on a cloudy night in early autumn in a stand of Quaking Aspen near the South Fork of Emerson Creek in the South Warner Wilderness, Modoc National Forest, Modoc County, California. The night was cool, and gentle breezes rustled the leaves of the Aspens throughout the night. Listen for the sound of a lone elk bugling just past the one minute mark.
This was recorded on a calm summer night beside Sugar Creek in the Sugar Creek Research Natural Area, which is located within the Russian Wilderness, Klamath National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. The creek flows down the east side of the Salmon Mountains, a subrange of the Klamath Mountains, in far northern California. The creek was low for this time of year, owing to a meager snowpack that had already melted entirely. The Sugar Creek Research Natural Area is a unique and special place. According to the U.S. Forest Service it was created "primarily to preserve the richest known assemblage of conifers in the world", in an area that has "essentially remained unchanged by humans since before the European colonization of California". You can learn more about it here- https://research.fs.usda.gov/psw/rnas/locations/sugar-creek
This was recorded on a cold, cloudy, and breezy summer morning in the Salmon Mountains near the Music Creek Trailhead in Klamath National Forest, Siskiyou County, California.
This was recorded on a clear spring night under a full moon beside Summit Meadow Lake in Marble Mountains Wilderness, Klamath National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. I recorded this tree ears style, in which a mic is placed on either side of the trunk of a tree, in this case a Red Fir. Though I recorded all night, this part of the recording is from the wee hours of the night when the frog chorus was starting to die down.
This was recorded on a cold and breezy spring morning near an unnamed pond on the east side of the Trinity Divide in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Siskiyou County, California. The recording starts a little after 4 a.m., and a little before the birds began their dawn chorus.