Menghuan Pond at Yangmingshan NP, Taipei City on Chinese New Year's Eve, January 2025
Menghuan Pond at Yangmingshan NP, Taipei City, January 28, 2025
Yangmingshan is a national park and a popular tourist destination in Taiwan. Whether on weekdays or weekends, it is always bustling with visitors.
Menghuan Pond, located near Lengshuikeng in Yangmingshan, is a nationally designated wetland in Taiwan. I had heard of its renowned reputation shortly after I began exploring field recording. It can be considered a model site for Taiwan’s natural soundscapes, which is why every time I go to record at Menghuan Pond, I do so partly with a sense of pilgrimage.
Before I started field recording, my visits to Yangmingshan were purely for hiking. Even then, I was conscious of pausing to experience moments of natural stillness. However, once I began field recording and focused my attention entirely on listening, all kinds of human-made noise became impossible to ignore. For someone hoping to capture the pristine sounds of nature, this is an unsettling reality. It’s no surprise that anyone who takes natural soundscape recording seriously seems inevitably drawn toward environmental conservation.
Back to the main topic — this time, I chose to visit Menghuan Pond on the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, hoping to minimize human-made disturbances during the recording.
Perhaps because it was winter, the frogs were not very active, and only occasional calls could be heard at Menghuan Pond. In the recording, there is one frog call coming from the right side at a relatively close distance. Additionally, the wind was quite strong that day, so wind noise was more prominent in the recording. My hope for fewer people also fell through — the number of visitors didn’t decrease despite it being Chinese New Year’s Eve. Conversations, car engines, and airplanes constantly entered the microphones’ range. In the end, I recorded for about an hour before escaping back to Lengshuikeng to catch the bus down the mountain.
Location: 25.167091, 121.560599