Summer is icummen in

Loudly sing cuckoo!

An old English folk song from Wessex (around 1260)

Summer is a-coming in
Loudly sing cuckoo
Groweth seed and bloweth mead
and springs the wood anew
Sing cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth aft-er lamb,
Calf loweth after cow,
Bullock starteth, buck farteth,
Merry sing cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!
Well singest thou cuckoo,
Nor cease thou never now!
Sing cuckoo now, Sing cuckoo!

You might know it as the song Christopher Lee sings in the 1973 horror film The Wicker Man. It's also the opening track on Richard Thompson's fab album 1000 Years of Popular Music.

School's out here so people are off to foreign parts to freeze or fry depending on the season. We are enjoying a bonus holiday looking after those who are left behind. Out in deepest darkest Sussex (just - the border with Surrey is at the bottom of the garden).

The birds seem convinced, but I'm not. I've seen a few swallows and heard a cuckoo off in the distance. Flaming June in a couple of days but the only flaming has been from the log fire.

Rain, rain, rain all week, and cold too.

Yesterday evening as I was preparing to cook (ooh!) the distant migrant perched in a tree at the edge of the oak wood at the bottom of the garden and really gave it some welly! So, I dashed outside with my recording gear to capture this.

Cuckoo recording on SoundCloud

For the technically curious, I was using an old iPhone 3Gs running Imesart's Audio Memos app and a Blue Mikey stereo microphone. The Mikey is a great mike indoors but it's horribly susceptible to wind noise. Even the gentle breeze that was barely stiring the leaves was giving problems.

I transferred the .WAV file from the iPhone to my MacBook pro to edit it using Felt Tip's Sound Studio. I topped and tailed the handling noise from the beginning and end of the recording, applied a high pass filter with a 500Hz cut off to get rid of the wind rumble and some of the aircraft noise, bumped up the volume by 3db and had a fairly decent recording.