Walter Tilgner

König des Waldes (King of the Forest) is a portrait of the red deer rut, recorded by Walter Tilgner in September 1994 on the Darss peninsula, on the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The disc runs from midday in the beech forest through a night at the rutting place to dawn. The booklet adds several sonograms and detailed explanations of the sounds of the rut.

Tilgner was born in 1934 in Olomouc, then in Czechoslovakia. After 1945 he grew up on a farm near Hünfeld in Germany, studied zoology and botany in Frankfurt, and worked as a biologist at the natural history museum on Lake Constance until his retirement. He is also a photographer of woodland scenes, and the author and producer of more than ten Natural Sound CDs for Wergo. Since 1999 he has been an honorary member of the Soundscape Forum Basel and of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Here he used a Denon DTR 80P DAT recorder and a Sonosax SX-M2 microphone amplifier with a Neumann KU 100 dummy-head microphone. The sonograms were made with the Avisoft SASLabPro programme of Raimund Specht, Berlin.

The sea on the western shore of the Darss opens the disc, with a stag roaring quietly behind it. Woodpeckers, a falling cone and a jay follow at midday, then grasshoppers and mosquitoes at dusk, rain and a thunderstorm. The high point is the night. More and more stags come to the rutting place, and the clash of antlers in a fight runs almost eight minutes. At dawn the stags withdraw into the undergrowth, a tawny owl calls, a robin ticks, and a male black woodpecker drums and meets the female.

Die Zeit described the scene closely: "A red deer is quietly roaring. Tree frogs croak. An older deer responds to a rival in the distance." The same review noted that the recordings come from the national park at Darss, a few hundred metres from the beaches. As a bonus the disc ends with The Wood Resounds, a shellac disc by Ludwig Koch from 1934.

CD, Wergo SM 90092, released in 1998 in the Natural Sound series. Total time 68 minutes 32 seconds.