In 2023, I learned about Ferme Beauchamp, an ecological conservation project of what used to be a private farm. It is located within the wilderness that stretches between the towns of Harrington and Montcalm in Western Quebec. With the farm buildings and house preserved, also preserved is a rich mosaic of natural habitats, starting from the meadows around the farmhouse, passing through the wooded valley of the Rivière Rouge river, and ending up in a full-grown mixed forest. I got a residency for a few days that year, and made sure I return here this year. Essentially, you are renting a weekend or week in a fully-maintained country-place for a few days to appreciate the nature and let it take you to enchanted places.
Each stay offers you new phacets of its rich pallet of soundscapes and community of birds. Where I record is not only a matter of choice for me, but also of logistics as a blind person of being able to access the site on my own or having an available companion to help me reach the site. Also, leaving the recorder involves concerns about its security.
Here are two recordings from this year. One has been taken during the morning of June 25 outside the farm house, where you hear birds of the meadow but also echoes and visiting birds from the surrounding forest. In the same recordings we can listen to a bobolink, barn swallows, tree swallows, grackles, red-winged blackbirds and tree swallows, but also more woodland birds like a hermit thrush (further off but still very discernable), a black-and-white warbler, a black-billed cuckoo, A blue jay, and at one point the hammering of a pileated woodpecker. Meanwhile,also present are common yellowthroats, a yellow warbler, warbling vireos, a Baltimore oriole, an Eastern phoebe, a least flycatcher and A wild turkey. As the grackles and bobolink dominate more in the beginning, the bluebird and oriole take over the foreground around the second half of the recording. This oriole sounds like a slow chordal theme of an unusually small cardinal. We also have fleeting appearances from a black-throated green warbler, an alder flycatcher, a red-tailed hawk (sounds like a whispered downward scream) and a blue-headed vireo
The next recording has been taken the morning of May 26, this time inside the forest, clearly warbler country. Already the warblers alone were numerous, including two ovenbirds, a northern parula, a Canada warbler, a blackburnian warbler, a black-throated green warbler, a black-throated blue warbler, a Nashville warbler and a Northern waterthrush.
Other birds include red-eyed vireos, two rose-breasted grosbeaks, a hermit thrush, a veery (only its call), a woodpecker called the yellow-bellied sapsucker and a ruffed grouse (sounds like a muffled bass drum).
One other thing special about this excursion is that it is the first one where I am using my new recording setup; A Telinga parabolic setup with DPA Stereo microphones. The result is a stereo parabolic recording that amplifies the sounds that the parabola is facing. Late in the second recording, I quietly offered my headphones (you have to use headphones to monitor the quality of your recording) to my companion, Florian Grond, himself an immersive recording artist who kindly helped me choose my recording gear and accompanied me in the second recording as well as in the excursion as a whole.
The team behind the Ferme Beauchamp have, in my opinion, truly reached a gold standard of preservation of nature, and the fact that you could have a fairly affordable stay and witness this constitutes a gesture of utmost generosity from their part. Thank you, amis de la Ferme Beauchamp. OtherFerme Beauchamp posts, including some from later in June, are coming up.
