Funny thing...I've done a lot of really unhealthy things to get great and unusual sounds and ambiances over the years, and always came through more or less as unharmed as I was before.
One day though, while out on a fishing trip by boat with a good friend, I found a not very big pasture with cows grazing around, looking mighty intellectual the way only a good cow can.
It's against my very nature to let an opportunity like this pass without a good reason, so I entered through the rocky shoreline, turned on the fieldrecorder, and headed to the critters.
I've done this lots of times before, and knew full well what to expect; At first they gonna look at me with the look of two braincells trying to connect, and then they all gonna surround me in a "circle of cow" with the head cow right in front of me, staring at me preeminently, trying to figure out whether to stomp me to kingdom come, or if I'm a pathetic lifeform not worthy of their stomping time and no threat of trying to eat them or their offspring.
It always end up after about half a minute with the leading cow (here an Norwegian Telemark-cow, having very long and extremely point horns) sceptically take a few steps towards me, who's just standing there minding my own business, take a sniff at my reached out hand, and figuring I'm not exactly capable of doing anything at all against them. Then lose interest in me completely. So they did this time too.
Anyway, for some reason, the leading cow (the one with the tremendous pointy horns) stopped at her way back towards the meadow, and turned her head towards me. With a speed I'd NEVER expect from a humongous lummox like this, the goddamn thing turned 180, lowered her horns, and gave out the most wicked bellow I've ever heard. With me running like a gazelle scared xxxxless back to the shore it went forward in full attack-mode.
One's not too cocky when a 500Kg pissed-off hamburger wanna turn you into a barbecue skewer while you're standing on a not very big stone in a lake, trying to neighter fall in the fieldrecorder-killing water nor become the new horn-decoration for a (possibly) man-eating cattle...
To make things even more interesting, it was a BIG lake, and the boat was a slow one with an electric motor barely able to outrun an infant even with full battery. This one wasn't full. And my friend was on the other side of an equally large island in the middle of the lake as not to disturb my recordings...
I whipped out my cellphone and called my friend, yelling (quote) "Get the beep over here this *beep*ing instant!!!" (end quote) at the top of my lungs.
After about (read: exactly) 11 minutes 24 seconds from when i pressed the disconnect button, I finally put my first leg back in the boat, ending this nice little (very one-sided) chat between me standing on the not too big boulder two meters from the shore, and the smug looking and noisy bastard, who's been reminding my very convincingly the last nearly 12 minutes who's da boss.
Somewhere around 20 minutes later I remembered to turn off the Fostex :-)