Walter Tilgner

Winter am Bodensee (Winter at Lake Constance) is a sound picture of the lake in the cold season, when it fills with winter visitors and staging migrants. Hundreds of curlews, whooper swans and gulls and thousands of ducks use its shallows and reedbeds to stop over, moult and overwinter. Walter Tilgner recorded them over many years, from 1987 to 2003.

Walter Tilgner is a German biologist and nature sound recordist, also well known as a photographer of woodland and forest scenes. He was born in 1934 in Olomouc, then Czechoslovakia, grew up after 1945 on a farm near Hünfeld, studied zoology and botany in Frankfurt in the 1950s, and worked until his retirement at the natural history museum on Lake Constance in Konstanz. He is author and producer of more than ten Natural Sound CDs for Wergo. At the lake he worked first only in spring, later in autumn and winter, mainly in the Rhine Delta of Vorarlberg, Austria. In recent years this was in cooperation with inatura, the Vorarlberg nature and natural history centre in Dornbirn.

The disc moves around the lake in thirteen tracks. On the Untersee one hears black-headed gulls on New Year's Day 1989, a duet of whooper swans recorded on Christmas Day 1994, and a coot and a water rail from February 2003. On the Gnadensee come gulls again and red-crested pochards. The longest section comes from the Rhine Delta: carrion crows, a morning in Fussach Bay from November 1989, curlews at two roosts, and cormorants at their roost from October 1987, the oldest recording here. The waves of the lake close the programme.

Tilgner did not arrange the recordings in chronological order. He wanted a harmonious whole, and "winter" is used in a wide sense, from autumn to early spring, so the dates run from September to February. What interests him, according to the label, is how different this soundscape is from that of spring and summer. He is an honorary member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and of the Soundscape Forum Basel.

CD, Wergo SM 9012 2, released in 2003 in the Natural Sound series. Total time 73 minutes 38 seconds.