The Crows, the Pink, and a Decision

Field Logs — Wednesday, October 28, 2026. First draft, written the same day.

Two field expeditions today, and the balance of the practice shifted under my feet: yesterday belonged to the camera, today belonged to the recorder. Thirty-four photographs against sixty-seven the day before; forty-seven minutes of audio against twenty-three. It was a day built around the crows — and around an investigation I believed I had closed, and making one large decision.

Field Log 005 — The Dawn Expedition

Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2026 (EDT, GMT−04:00)
Recordings: 06:28:11–07:39:48 — 18 files, 35:52 of audio (Tascam DR-05X, 24-bit / 48 kHz)
Photographs: 34 taken; sunrise at 7:26 a.m.
Video: the video camera, prepared and used alongside the recorder

The balcony, and the Conference

I went out at about 6:30 with the recorder and, this time, the video camera prepared — not just the phone. The first file stands alone (06:28:11–06:30:22), and then, from 06:47 to 07:22, the session runs nearly unbroken: sixteen recordings of the dawn crow roosting behaviour, the Conference, taken at length from the balcony.

I had spent the night before researching crow behaviour extensively, and I will be honest about the morning: what I got was not what I had anticipated, or hoped for. It is part of the game. It is hit and miss. A record that only kept its good days would not be a record at all — you are either a Field Artist or you aren't, and it is not for the faint of heart. The recordings stand as what the morning actually gave.

The pink

The camera came out late — 07:18, inside the crow session's last files — and the expedition's last movement was photographs only, down at the dock, in the silent gap between recordings. There, at 07:26:57, one minute after sunrise, I took the photograph I had been chasing for three days: the church across the river under a fully pink sky, its spire reflected almost perfectly in calm water. Can you see now why I've been crazy over this pinkness at dawn? It wasn't as saturated the other days.

The numbers, when they came, refined the perception without overturning it. Measured across the morning's frames, the saturation is low — this was no saturated spike. What the palettes show instead is dominance: frame after frame carrying forty percent or more of its pixels in pink-family tones, dusty rose and mauve, where yesterday's frames at the same phase were blue-grey. The pink is a wash over everything, not a flash in one corner of the sky. That is precisely its ethereal quality — and it is the muted register my Moral Temperature Cards have always worked in.

Field Log 006 — The Late-Morning Expedition

Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2026 (EDT, GMT−04:00)
Recordings: 09:12:59–09:50:34 — 8 files, 11:21 of audio
Photographs: one frame, 09:06, ahead of the recordings

The metal box

Later in the morning I went back up to the park and ran the shielding experiment: the recorder inside a metal box — the Faraday-cage test, the one designed test from the battery that most needed running. My first listening said it did not stop the distortion — but I had not listened long enough. The recording's first seconds are the recorder still in my hand, being put into the box; once the lid was closed, there is no distortion at all. Zero. The shield worked. After the grocery store I recorded about five minutes at a street intersection with traffic lights, near the highway, some two or three hundred metres from the park — and the distortion is in that recording too. But a recording made on the bike path near the top of St-Anne street, just before the train tracks, is clean. It is on and off, place by place.

The event, reopened — and narrowed

So the map widened, and the conclusion moved. My reading of it, from the beginning, was clockwork: the measured fingerprint is a clocked signal — pulses on a one-millisecond grid, gated on a twenty-millisecond cycle — and clocked electronics are everywhere in a modern village. What the metal box actually proved is the opposite of my first report: the interference does not originate in the recorder. It arrives through the air, a radiated field, and breaks into an unshielded instrument — consumer-grade susceptibility, which is not a failure and not a flaw. I am glad to have my two Tascams; they remain my test recorders. The Interference in The Park Event is therefore explained in its path, if not yet in its source. The expeditions go on — and so, it turns out, does the investigation.

The decision

After long deliberation, I am investing in the practice properly: a Zoom F3 field recorder, two microphones from Mic Booster, the cables, a bag, a waterproof hard case, weatherproof notebooks and a weatherproof mechanical pencil for the logs. Getting everything ready to do real field recording, for real. And there is a horizon beyond it that I can already see: another level of instrument exists, the thousand-dollar tier, and if ten years of this brings contracts, or studies, or research on the mountain, that tier will come in its season. A week ago I could not have foreseen any of this. I am finding my place in the universe, my purpose, more than ever.

A correction, after the fact

Yesterday's post carried a passage about the camera's numbers — ISO 400 at 7:13, ISO 25 by 7:40 — presented as the dawn's light log. It was true of the nine frames I had then examined. The full set, sixty-seven photographs, has since been measured, and the dawn's actual arc begins at ISO 4000 at 06:07, in near-darkness, and descends the whole staircase to 25. The passage was partial because I had only taken a small sample of the frames to examine; the correction belongs here, stated openly, the original left standing. That is how discrepancies are handled in these logs. Absolute Truth is an idea, an ideal, that we will never reach; as a thinker I believe in the systematic, almost pathological doubt of Descartes. Doubt everything — and correct in the open.

Palettes, computed — and palettes to come

The photographs now yield a second kind of log: a script reads the image light log and computes the day's palette — every colour, weighted by its share, duplicates merged — and draws it as a square grid. Leftover squares are filled with the resultant: the share-weighted average of all the day's colours, the one tone the whole set resolves to. Yesterday's sixty-seven frames resolve to a blue-grey. Today's resolve to a dusty mauve. The two days, as single tones, are the whole argument about the pink:

Field Log Palette, October 27, 2026

Field Log Palette, October 28, 2026

And the computation is about to acquire an adversary. Physics Toolbox, one of the sensor apps, has a Color Detector: point the camera at a scene, and it reads the actual HEX colour at the point you choose. From the next expeditions, I will sample colours in the field, at strategic points of the scene before me — sky, stone, water — and afterwards compare those actual palettes against the ones computed from the photographs. Two independent readings of the same light, each used to question the other. It is part of what I call continuous adversarial review: adversarial, never hostile — you have to question yourself, and review everything, continuously, or you cannot be an interdisciplinary artist-researcher at all.

Next steps

Publish this tonight, the same day it happened — that is the rhythm I want for these logs whenever the day allows. Then: the crow recordings, listened to properly; the remaining photographs from today, downloaded and run through the same analysis; the first field samples with the Color Detector on the next expedition; and the kit, ordered and assembled. The practice is equipping itself.

— A.G.