Ours Goes to 17
Recently, on one of our early morning walks, I was reminded of a particular Spinal Tap scene. For those of you unfamiliar with the film “This is Spinal Tap,” it’s a Rob Reiner Mockumentary film about a fictitious band - a concert film so to speak - documenting what ultimately becomes a fateful tour of an over-the-hill heavy metal band. If you don’t know the film, you should watch it, it is full of 1980’s humor.
There’s a particular scene where one of the band members is explaining how the band can play their music so loud. He explains that, while most bands’ amplifiers go to 10 on the loudness scale, “These go to 11.” Click here if you want to see a YouTube click of the scene.
So what does this have to do with morning walks you might ask? Well, as you well know, most mornings Ann and I go for a walk, often before dark. We stick to photographer morning hours throughout the year so that when we do go out shooting, it’s not too grueling to wake up at 4:00 to get out photographing. That means, after we’ve had our morning espresso, we’re generally walking in the dark (up here in the northern latitudes, that’s not fully the case in the summer).
We’ve settled on a standard walk that we’ll vary, often by going counter clockwise versus clockwise in the loop, or sometimes by truncating it and not looping back, but continuing home via a different path. Regardless, it’s typically a close-enough-to 3 mile walk. We’ve really gotten into listening to the birds (at home and on the walk) and there are 2 corridors - Bird Alley and the lake stretch - where the birds are plentiful and often varied.
Ann has started to record lengthy sections of our morning walk to see, in part, if the birds in the neighborhood have been changing. On one such trip, as we were walking by the local football (that’s soccer for you US folks) club, we were going through the list that had formed from the walk through Bird Alley. As is often the case, there were 10 different birds identified (in the late Spring, the number varies from 8 to 10). A few minutes later, she starts a new recording while we’re walking the lake stretch. There were a few of the familiar birds, but also 2 more (a swan call and a coot). Then it struck me, if Ann had left her recording going, we would have gone to 12 - one more than Spinal Tap! Understand, when I told Ann that we could have gotten to 12 if she’d left her recording on, she replied “We could have had one more than Spinal Tap!” It’s not just me.
So a couple of days later (we had some intense showers that delayed our morning walks into later morning where there are fewer birds announcing themselves to the world) Ann set her recording on for the entire walk. We can proudly say, ours goes to 17! Count them yourself.
Actually, it should have been 18. As we were approaching the football training ground a couple of magpies flew by and cawed at us. For some odd reason, the recording didn’t recognize the call. And it could have been 19, the swans stayed quiet that morning. Oh well, 17 different bird calls in one morning is a new record for us.
It definitely helps make the early morning walks more interesting.