Roe deer rutting calls in Teign Gorge — reduced background sound

This is https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/706657/ , with noise reduction and so with much more distant detail. The roe deer stags are rutting, uttering their strange and sonorous challenges. The loud ones we hear, straight in front of us, are not this side of the valley at all, but quite some way away, on lower slope of the hill on the other side of the valley. Others we hear more distantly are mostly on this (south) side of the valley, but further east (downstream, on our right).

I made this recording on 22 October 2023 during the first of two ascents from Fingle Bridge to Cranbrook Castle (ancient hill fort) — over an hour from about 10.0 a.m. BST. I couldn't find any fully ideal spot to record this. As you can see from the photo, I made do with a lot of trees and bracken in the way of getting a really clear recording of the performance.

When I descended back down to Fingle Bridge the sound was very impressive — much more sonorous, and from there you could much more clearly hear other stags calling on both sides of the valley a little further downstream. However, the people noise and barking dogs down there precluded any attempt at that. One needed to be there midweek and not to be committed to a leg-strengthening hike with oodles of reasonably steep gradient, as I was on this occasion.

At the recording position there was a beautiful faint reverberation from each of the calls that weren't very faint / distant, but this recording seems not to have picked that up at all. I made another recording at lunchtime, with my normal wide-angle setting, and that did very slightly pick up the reverb, but it was at too low a level to be really noticed. I'm not uploading that recording because most of the distant stags appeared to have given up the contest by then, so it's less interesting even though a nice recording (after editing out a hell of a lot of disturbance!).

Advisory
Apologies — I think I've overdone the level increase for this one. I recommend turning the volume control down 2 or 3dB!

Related upload to follow:

Nature-Symphony 14 (already done and queued for upload, with not a wind chime in sight). — As they say, 'Go figure!'.

This recording in progress. A deep steep-sided valley lies between here and the Prestonbury Castle hill beyond, yet the louder rutting calls we hear aren't on this side at all, but on the lower slopes of that hill.

Techie stuff
The recorder was Sony PCM-D100 with mics set to narrow angle (90°), with two nested Windcut furry windshields. It was set up on a Sirui carbon-fibre tripod.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields, and stereo widening, using the VST plugin A1 Stereo Control (135% widening), to give a moderate zoomed-in effect (effectively restoring basic soundstage coverage to my normal 120°.

To produce this version I used Audacity to apply noise reduction, in two 6dB steps, using a particularly clean sample of the background sound of the distant River Teign. I raised the level after that to slightly overcompensate for the overall level reduction caused by the noise reduction. That extra bit of amplification made sense because it allowed so much more distant detail to be heard.

Because at such a distance the river's audible sound was relatively narrow frequency range and very consistent, this noise reduction worked much better than on my previous attempts, quite some years ago, when they were unacceptably degraded. Maybe also Audacity now uses a better noise-reduction 'engine' — I don't know. Anyway, whatever slight degradation of the 'wanted' sound has occurred this time is outweighed by the increased clarity of detail and the ability to hear the distant stags much more clearly.

I did also try the noise reduction in WavePad, but it was hopeless, either grossly overdoing it and degrading 'wanted' sound also, or doing it to an acceptable level but with distracting artifacts in the reduced background sound. Actually I had to re-edit this version because the noise reduction had exposed some sounds I didn't want to be noticeable — primarily distant dogs barking, and also a few brief episodes of now obtrusive mic wind noise quite a commendation of that particular Audacity noise-reduction.

Later note (19 September 20224):
With much more Nature-Symphony experience under my belt, I can say with security that I'd not done the full job in producing this version of the recording, and the Nature-Symphony I made from it. Revisiting the Nature-Symphony today, as expected I noticed that the bird sounds were way over-shrill. Reason? — That spectral subtraction noise-reduction always unbalances the sound in favour of the treble. I just tried applying a whacking '-12db' EQ tilt (using a straight-line curve from 100Hz (no change) to 8K (-12db) to the Nature-Symphony, and that immediately resolved the issue, with the bird sounds now sounding natural, without unnatural shrillness.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!