It all begun back in about 1970, when as a child I used to visit my grand parents in Larkfield, on the south side of Dublin city. One evening I heard a blackbird in song at the end of the garden. Even as an eight year old I thought how beautiful it was.
A few years later a friend sent over to our house two valve open reel tape recorders. Although they were somewhat old and worn I had fun recording sounds with them and playing back the recordings at different speeds. I was fascinated with the machines. Sometime in the mid 1970s I saw a cassette recorder and I remember being surprised at its sensitivity, so I wondered if I bought one I could begin to record various sounds away from power sockets, for instance I could have a go at recording the sounds of the fruit market in Moore Street before it was knocked down (As it happened it was only partly knocked to make way for the Ilac shopping center).
   In 1979 I bought my first proper tape recorder, a Revox B77. At the time I didn't have the knowledge to make any serious recordings, though I certainly had fun and learned a lot. In 1983 I bought the first of two Uher 4200 portable reel to reel recorders. At last I was able to make recordings in the wilds. In those days I used fairly insensitive dynamic mics, these are not really suitable for wildlife recording, so in time for the spring 1984 season I bought a much better microphone, I soon got a second mic of the same type for stereo (They weren’t matched for stereo, but I knew nothing about such niceties at the time). By the following year I was beginning to do some useful work, some recordings I have not bettered since. In 1985 I made a cassette called 'Suburban Birds' a bit basic by my present standards, I only made 11 copies. Soon I followed it with the tape 'More Suburban Birds' In 1989 I made a tape cassette called 'The Joy of Birdsong.' This tape and the others were improved by having a printed cover, these I made on a small hand operated, table mounted printing press and some black ink from an old tin in the attic. Gradually I began to find various places to record, for instance in 1988 I visited the Great Saltee island where I recorded enough material to make 'Birds of the Great Saltee.' Over the years I have made improved versions of the tapes 'Suburban Birds' and 'More Suburban Birds' and 'The Joy of Birdsong.' In 1989 I moved out of Dublin to north county Wexford. Those first few years were quite good for recording as it was reasonably quiet. At that time I was working on my second film (16mm and separate magnetic sound track) but that is another story. For those first few years I was busy with building my house and turning the site into 'Home,' so I didn't travel much. In 1995 I bought a portable DAT recorder. In 1997 I felt it was time to travel, so off I went to Finland (where I got enough material to make 'Birds of Finland'. The following year I went to Wales where I made some good recordings. In 1999 I was in Finland again (On my return I made 'Luonnon Laulut' which means 'Natures Song.') Since then I have been to Belize in central America four times where I recorded lots of amazing sounds, enough to make three amazing albums 'Garden of Songs' 'Forest Home' and 'Out of the blue.' I have made other albums of birdsong / wildlife sounds and even two of other sounds. These days I record to compact flash memory cards in High definition audio, that is 24 bit 48Khz, sometimes if the subject is high-pitched I set the sampling rate to 96Khz. Unfortunately just as the equipment gets small, light, affordable and very high performance, the opportunities for recording are few and far between, even this is spoiled by man made noise. I wonder sometimes if it is worthwhile trying to record at all.