Winter at Lake Constance

The numerous winter visitors and staging migrants gathering at Lake Constance in winter provide a magnificent and endlessly fascinating wildlife spectacle, which is also reflected in the many and varied sounds we hear from this sound image. Hundreds of Curlews, Whooper Swans and gulls, thousands of ducks, as well as many other bird species, have chosen Lake Constance, with its extensive shallows and reedbeds as a staging, moulting and overwintering site.
For more than 20 years, at first only in the spring, later in the autumn and winter, Walter Tilgner has been making digital sound-recordings in the typical fen and reedbed habitats of the Lake Constance landscape, mainly in the Rhine Delta of Vorarlberg, Austria, and over recent years in cooperation with the organization Vorarlberger Naturschau – inatura [Vorarlberg Conservation and Natural History Study Centre, Dornbirn, Austria].
What Tilgner has succeeded in doing is to weave together a characteristic winter soundscape or tapestry of sounds, though the term “winter” as a season is used in the wide sense, i.e. including autumn and extending through to early spring. The aim has been to present some kind of harmonious whole, so that the idea of simply arranging the recordings in chronological sequence was rejected at the outset.
It is the sounds associated with this winter scene, fundamentally different from those typical of the spring and summer, that Tilgner finds particularly attractive. Walter Tilgner has the ability to “hear with his heart”, and the unrivalled gift of being able to convey to us all something that will enrich us throughout our lives – a feeling for the beauty of birdsong and other sounds of nature.

For further information on Walter Tilgner, please visit his website: www.natur-tilgner.de