Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

I was on a Victor Emanual Nature Tours trip to Colorado when our group went to the Bledsoe ranch in Yuma County; the ranch owner not only gave us permission to view the lek–he gave us seat pads to sit in comfort in a converted horse-trailer blind to see and photograph them to our hearts’ content. I set my Zoom recorder with stereo microphone on the ground a small distance from the blind–it was nestled in a shoe so it would be at a nice angle for recording. (You can look at the setup here.) It was an ideal morning, at the height of lek activity but with virtually no wind. I cut out the very lowest frequencies and a bit of talking, coughing, and bumping things inside the blind, but overall this is edited very little.