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I've been working on this project for approaching 10 months and want to share some highlights.

The quietness of the fall + winter seasons suggests that most sounds I'll capture in the remaining 2 months will not be terribly distinct from one another or from the earliest field recordings made last December, except in terms of sound quality, since I acquired new and better devices during the year. So despite there being 2 months left in the project, I don't expect many more standout recordings to appear.

All these recordings were made within 50 meters of my doorstep.

#1: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/667254/
December 29, 2022. The project's first recording.

#2: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/667438/
December 30. The first weather I recorded.

#3: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/667591/
January 1, 2023. New Year fireworks, as heard from far away.

#4: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/670140/
January 17. A bunch of crows raising hell. I haven't heard them get noisy like this since, and still clip excerpts from this one recording for various songs.

#5: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/677216/
February 28. A big compilation of Spring sounds which happened within the span of a few days.

#6: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/679721/
March 21. A mated pair of barred owls.

#7: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/691504/
June 18. One of the best thunderstorms I captured throughout the year.

#8: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/697773/
July 5. Another storm. It's the longest single recording I made (in terms of final length, not in terms of total time spent recording in one session) and probably the longest sound I've put on this website.

#9: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/701956/
September 6. It's my first sound-activated field recording. All the sounds which happened over a 15-hour span are concatenated together into one compilation where they play end-to-end. This type of recording has many uses, from tracking wildlife in an area to detecting weather. Walls and buildings make it hard to hear what's going on outside our homes, but this VCVA technique allows us to find out without having to listen to hours of intervening silence.

#10: https://freesound.org/people/strangehorizon/sounds/704500/
October 1. My best recording of fire thus far. I'm planning bigger fires in future.

I learned a lot this year about how to extend sound engineering outside of the studio and out into nature. Which device to use, where to put it, how to orient it, how to carry it, how to walk, what to wear. I also began to pay attention to what animals are active at a given time, during which parts of the year, and so on. I learned their names and habits, and my appreciation of them now exists as a timeless archive rather than a momentary thought. Recordings, happening over time, bring a sense of "completeness of experience" which art and photography struggle to match.

The inhabitants and effects of nature provide incredible inspiration, not only in the direct and imitative sense, but also in the broadening of one's mindset. The forces at work, and the beasts and plants, should provide sufficient company for anyone. A day may come when no one has the luxury of sharing this company anymore, so I am exchanging pieces of myself for pieces of the land while it's still green.

Well, I hope this was interesting.

Yes, it is. Thank you !

Some songs which I made with, and often because of, field recordings:

I Said It With My Hands
Wanderer-in-Darkness
Dark Wind
Erosion Song
Meditation No.93 - The Narrow
Drawtober 11: Nightmare
Percussion Suite No.33 for Frickin' Everything (this one opens with a bit of profanity)

It is not often that field recordings alone inspire a track, but they usually do add extra texture and immersion, which gives a song a stronger sense of place and makes it seem more like a story.
The field recordings also very often inspired me to create "alternate world soundscapes" by processing the recordings until they sounded like other worlds. This often resulted in spooky caves, monsters, and night creatures as well as all manner of strange dimensions:

deep sea odyssey
magnolia grandiflora 2
mysterious pizza
summer night spooktacular 7
horror ocean 6

A standout field recording from today: city noise 2.

When Fall arrives, these sounds become the norm to hear throughout the day and night. But, it seems they do vary widely enough in timbre, volume, and distance to present as unique objects that are worth recording. I suspect recordings like this, along with recordings of fire and wind, will make up the majority of standout recordings I gather during this last 2 months of the project.

We have all seen and heard enough depictions of the four seasons to have a sense of which sounds belong where, but hearing it happen and making your own recordings of it is altogether quite different. I begin to understand where seasons end and begin, which animals are unafraid of the dark, which are unafraid of wind and rain and human beings and strange recording devices placed out in the woods, which trees rattle the most in the wind, what kind of water quality is preferred by different kinds of frogs, and which animals move more on dark nights or full moons.

If you've never tried field recording, I really recommend it. Even one attempt at it, done on your phone, can do a lot.