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August 31, 2008
Elk Bugling - In August?
Believe it or not, the bull elk are already starting to bugle tonight, and it's still August. So, I guess they're getting a head start this year. And they are loud. I mean crazy loud when they're standing in your back yard. I'm trying to record one now with my laptop....hold the line.
OK. Got my laptop out and installed Audacity and the LAME MP3 encoder and hooked up my trick USB microphone to record the bull. I went onto the redwood deck and plugged the laptop into an outside wall outlet because I drained my laptop battery trying to shoot a timelapse video of the Casiopea and the Little Dipper up at Chinn's Lake last night.
After I recorded a few of the elk's bugle, I went out back and put a 2 million candlepower Cyclops spotlight on him to see how big he was and, I'm not going to lie, he's a beast. He's got one cow following him around. The light eventually chased him into the neighbor's yard.
To get him to come back, I hooked up some external speakers to the laptop and used Windows Media Player to play his own recorded bugle back to him, which drove him nuts. He came trotting back and is down there destroying the choke cherries. I mean, has torn the crap out of the choke cherries. I'm sure of this.
Then, I turned on my wireless LAN card, and shared my Audacity files to the network, and went inside to my home network. I copied all of my elk mp3 files from my laptop outside over the wireless network onto on of my desktops.
Then, I opened the .mp3 in Audacity and amplified it a bit. From inside, I opened an RDP session to my laptop outside, and remotely controlled it by alternately playing a random elk bugle, and then recording the response in Audacity. The elk was furious that there was another bull around, but he couldn't ever find him. Actually, I'm reasonably sure that he figured out that I was messing with him and left.
In any event, it's about 3:00 a.m. here. Time for my Obama wakeup call.
In the final analysis, I got some fairly decent bull elk recordings. Not great, but it gives you an idea of what a bull elk sounds like when he's trying to call in a herd of cows:
(Warning: Keep one hand on your volume control on these. They're safe for work, of course, but some of them are louder than others, so buyer beware.)
elk_bugle_1.mp3
elk_bugle_2.mp3
elk_bugle_3.mp3
elk_bugle_4.mp3
elk_bugle_5.mp3
elk_bugle_6.mp3
elk_bugle_7.mp3
Posted by Rob Kiser on August 31, 2008 at 12:42 AM
Comments
3 cows are now standing at my backdoor. What do I do now?
Posted by: sl on August 31, 2008 at 10:08 AM
Get a rifle and a butcher knife.
Posted by: Rob Kiser on August 31, 2008 at 7:42 PM