There was about 30cm of old frozen snow in the woods above Arzier, air temperature was about -2 deg C with a clear blue sky and glorious sunshine. Spring was in the air, very invigorating weather and with a firm footing good to be out.

I had been following a small flock of Crossbills (Loxia curvirostra) steadily uphill for about 20mins when I emerged into the small valley through which runs the path to Les Frasses. The valley is about 100 m wide and 1 km long, and at 1100m above sea level more or less at the limit of decidouous trees. The valley bottom is used for summer grazing so deviod of woody vegetation but with the largely coniferous forest rising on either side quite steeply. (For a Google Earth image click here.)

Standing quietly at the edge of the woods I could hear activity on the frozen snow fruther up the valley. Scanning carefully, about 200m away were two foxes playing around. One ran towards me with raised tail and arched back, being chased by the other - clearly some early spring randy behaviour going on here. I watched them in silence for a while and they disappeared into the woods on the eastern side of the valley. As I turned back to my Crossbills which were still calling further up and to my right, I heard one of the foxes begin to bark about 100m away and was able to get a short recording:

• Fox (Vulpes vulpes) (23s 533Mb)

It was a busy morning at Geneva airport (about 35km away) with lots of aircraft rumble so unfortunately I had to suppress frequencies below 500Hz quite heavily in post-editing. But nonetheless I was very happy with my first recording of this animal which actually is reasonably common in my neighbourhood.

However back to the Crossbills, and I climbed up through the woods on the north and eastern side of the valley towards where I could hear their "excitement" calls coming from the tree-tops. After about 10 mins hiking through the trees I stopped to listen and realised that the foxes, probably aware of my presence had done the opposite, and were working their way up the western side of the valley, and were now at about the same elevation as myself and maybe 300m away across the divide. With one of them yapping away at intervals, I tried to get a secure footing in the icey underbrush and began recording, as I did, I became aware of a "pooping" noise away to the north (my right) which could only be coming from a Eurasian Scops Owl (Otus scops). I had never heard one in the day time before and presumably it had been disturbed by the noise of the foxes. So after getting a few fox calls I turned the parabola towards the owl realising it was some way off deeper in the forest. Meanwhile the Crossbills were still chattering above my head somewhere. 

Turning back to the foxes I then discovered that a Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus) had now wandered between us and began to bark an alarm at me in irritation, before running off south through the forest. This new interloper had the effect of silencing the Scops Owl, but the Foxes and Crossbills each continued with their business.

I was lucky in being able to capture this whole event, and four sequences from the longer recording follow, each related to the above story. As before I suppressed frequencies below 500Hz to reduce the aircraft rumble, with the exception of the third sequence when the Roe Deer was barking where I felt filtering took too much out of the sound of the deer.

• Fox,Owl,Deer (2m42s 4Mb)

There are small handling noises occasionally in this piece, caused by my discomfort on a steep, icey and rather unstable surface. But for a February morning I felt priviliged to have had such encounters.

And the Crossbills ? They chattered away in the tree tops quite unconcerned by the activity below, more focussed on getting their own breeding activities underway:

• Crossbill excitement calls  (30s  477k)

So I felt this was quite a satisfactory time for a cold Sunday in February.

Tech Notes: all recordings with a Telinga Pro5 and hand-held parabola into a Fostex FR2LE. Editing done with Adobe Audition. Photos thanks to Wikipedia.