The whales’ song is key to their amazing behavior, and BBC soundrecordist Joe Stevens recorded the call using a single DPA 8011 hydrophone recording onto a solid state compact flash recorder.
Please note: this article is about a discontinued product
BBC sound recordist Joe Stevens has been using the DPA 8011 hydrophone, supplied by UK distributor Sound Network, to record whale sounds in Alaska and the Arctic for the recently televised BBC One TV series, Nature's Great Events. Filmed on HD and with specialist sound recording, the series visits locations where the natural world undergoes an amazing annual transformation, following the fate and lives of the creatures caught up in these events.
Stevens made two separate trips, the first to Southeast Alaska to capture the unique humpback whale bubble netting behaviour that occurs there, featured in The Great Feast episode. Bubble netting is a sound the whales use to help surround herring with a rising net of bubbles, before exploding up through the centre with mouth agape to swallow as much fish as possible.
The whales’ song is key to this amazing behavior, and Stevens recorded the call using a single DPA 8011 hydrophone recording onto a solid state compact flash recorder. The hydrophone was deployed from the filming boat and let down as deep as the cable would allow, with boat engines turned off. Keeping a safe distance from the whales, the best recordings were taken on flat, calm days that further minimised background noise, making the recordings particularly clear.
Stevens subsequently used the DPA 8011 on a trip to the Canadian Arctic, where the team spent a month on the sea ice finding and filming narwhals - elusive tusked whales - during their annual journey through the inlets as the ice breaks up. This migration was featured in the opening episode, The Great Melt. The team worked on the edge of the ice, again deploying the hydrophone as deep as possible to minimise the sounds of ice movement. ”It was essential for everyone to turn off snow mobiles and even stop walking as we could hear the sounds of footsteps transmitted through the ice,” says Stevens. “The whales use echolocation and an astonishing variety of whistles, pops and clicks to find cracks and openings in the ice where they can surface to breath during their migration.”
These unique underwater sound recordings helped illustrate the fascinating biology of these whales that use sound to survive in such remote and wild locations.