Territorial Tern

After leaving my recorder on the shoreline, I noticed an arctic tern flying close and making what I understood to be the occasional warning cry. I froze at first then moved slowly off, the bird still paying attention and seeming to register agitation. Unsure of the level of danger (if any) I was in and unable to spot any nest that I needed to avoid, I moved with head bowed across the shingle. Deciding that the tern, which was making shrill cries and clicks, might be aggrieved by the small recorder itself (a Sony PCM-10) I went to retrieve it, noticing one of the microphones had been submerged (a soaking it would not recover from). Once I’d returned to the recorder, the tern’s cries put the recording level into the red on every pass. The overloaded signal meant that Radio Aporee’s platform initially rejected the audio file as “broken” until I broke my “no processing” rule and did a hard limit on the file.