For the second part of the soundscape project, I decided to create the Bird Sanctuary  soundscape. You can see my planning , thoughts, and soundmap(s) on my Week 5 project page.  I recorded using the Tascam DR-05X.  I ended up not recording the cashier, gate, or footstep sounds because I decided that it would be too much to add to the narrative, so I just focused on the birds and their environment. The challenges for this project were having to adjust the gain on the fly because some (most!) of the birds were super loud, but some were a little shy and would only speak quietly when you got up close to them.  Along with this, they were all making noise at once so I had to be really aware of where I was pointing the microphone to isolate the sounds I wanted to record.  Because it was an outside location, I brought a "dead cat" windshield to help with any wind or breath sounds, but I think it scared the birds so I ended up not using it.  This may have affected the sound quality. There were also a lot of people the day I was recording, so that was an issue in post trying to equalize so they were low enough to be part of the background noise but not sound too distorted.  The solution for this was to add an equalizer to the "pickle" track (you'll know it when you hear it) and try to lower the 1K-4K levels per the instructor's video.  I also added a background track of low level conversations that I recorded seperate from the birds under everything, but kept the volume low.  There was also a source of flowing water nearby so I added that as a separate background track as well.  To help blend the clips together, I added various amounts of crossfading between each clip and adjusted the volume to try to match them as close as possible.  At the end of the scoundscape, to fade out I used an exponential fade on each track to fade to zero at the end.