Nighttime visitors

On the way home from a recent trip to western New Mexico and the White Mountains of Arizona, I stopped near the Gila River Bird area to spend the night.  I stayed in this same spot about a year and a half ago (see Things that go bump in the night).  At that time, the springtime birds were going full tilt.  This time, at the tail end of the monsoon, most of the migratory birds had already headed south, but the insects were singing like crazy.   I was there to record the insects, but I hadn’t anticipated the number of nighttime visitors I would have.

When I arrived at the river in the early afternoon, the cicadas were chorusing loudly.  At sunset, as the temperatures began to cool, the cicadas quit singing and the crickets started.  I made some recordings of the cicadas and crickets near the river, then packed up my gear and headed for my tent.  I had set up my tent under a huge cottonwood tree, which had just started changing color and dropping its leaves, covering the ground with a thick layer of leaf litter.  Like I often do when I’m camping, I set up my microphone on a table outside of the tent, and ran a long cable into the recorder in the tent.  That way if I awoke to any interesting sounds, I just had to turn the recorder on.

As darkness fell, I moved into the tent and recorded a half an hour of a lovely cricket chorus.  I had no sooner drifted to sleep when loud stomping through the leaf litter near my tent woke me up:

I desperately wanted to grab my headlamp and shine it outside to see who my nighttime visitor was, but I knew the microphone would pick up the noise.  So I lay there, not moving, hoping whatever it was would move on around my tent, and not walk over the top of me.  It sounded to me like something with hooves, and my guess would be javelina.

After I settled down again and was lulled back to sleep by the crickets, again I was awakened by stomping through the litter:

I lay there listening to some animal moving around outside of my tent, trying not to think about how potentially vulnerable I was in my little nylon cocoon, miles away from the nearest other human.  This sound was different from the first, and my guess would be a skunk.  In the morning, when I checked the area for tracks, there were fresh tracks of a hog-nosed skunk and javelina near my camp.

I was awakened several more times during the night, but nothing else seemed to come right up to my tent.   Next time I camp in this area, I think I’ll find a different spot for my tent.

Recording notes:  Recorded with a Sony PCM-M10 and Audio-Technica AT2022 microphone with Felmicamps SK3.5 preamp.