I recently became interested in doing nature recordings and have started this amateur collection. When I first starter earlier this year I figured it would be easy, just go out buy a recorder and walk around. Well I quickly discovered if you wish to have something useful you need to do a little planning first. Holding a hand held recorder up in the air may get you started but most recordings will contain handling, or wind noise.
I decided to get an external Rode NT4 microphone with a wind cover and mount it on a tripod. This allows me to easily carry and deploy the microphone into a location where I can sit down somewhere and hit the record button as the birds start singing. This set up help reduce the problem with "self" microphone noise and it gives a cleaner sounding recording overall.
I learned along the way how much bad noise is out here in nature, I never noticed it too much until I began my attempt at doing nature recordings. I'm talking about, passing vehicles, motorcycles racing by, prop and Jet aircraft passing overhead every time I hit the record button. Sometimes I think my record button turns on and off the "bad noise". I figure I was use to hearing all that "noise" and it was not until I tried to listen to nature did the other noises start to bother me. This experience has made me realize just how far one would need to go to NOT hear man made noise. The world is getting smaller.
Anyway - here with my meager offerings. Apologize if you hear the effects of noise reduction artifacts - I tried to remove the annoying JETs that were going overhead, did not seem to work too well. Once I hone my skills, I will replace these.
The spectrum images represent the actual recording.