Page 10 - Natural World Summer 2017

love wildlife
david tipling/2020vision My first night
Melissa Harrison spent three years trying to hear the elusive nightingale. Finally, with Essex
There’s one!’ says Charlie,
almost as soon as we get out
of the car. He looks at me,
smiling, one finger aloft. I freeze and hear them
listen: surely it can’t be as easy as
that? But if one was singing distantly
it’s stopped now, and after a
moment I zip up my coat, shoulder
my binoculars and put on my gloves.
We’re at Fingringhoe Wick, near
Colchester, on a cold spring evening.
Essex Wildlife Trust’s Charlie Oliver
has promised me nightingales – my
first ever – and while I’m looking
forward to hearing them, of course,
it’s a complicated feeling. I caught a
packed train here from central
London after a long day at work and
now I’m worried that the sound
won’t live up to the hype I’ve been
absorbing about them all my life.
10 NATURAL WORLD summer 2017
We’re not
half way
when we
We begin to walk up the track. The
hawthorn is coming into bloom and
the wood to our right is a froth of
spring green; the sky is clearing to
apricot, the sun low and golden.
Three years ago I realised I’d never Bookham, but I couldn’t find him. I
heard a nightingale, and wanted to
put it right. Bookham Common, in
Surrey, reportedly had several; it was to persuade myself I’d heard a
also somewhere I knew well. But it
was too late for me to hear them
that year. The following spring I had
another go. The common was loud
with song thrushes, blackbirds, robins,
blackcaps and warblers, but I didn’t
hear anything that sounded like the
nightingales I’d listened to online.
I went twice more and still drew a
blank. The brief window passed, for
the males fall silent as soon as they
have attracted a mate. Last year I
tried again; numbers had reportedly
fallen to a single singing male at
tried nearby Capel, a private reserve
whose numbers were up, and tried
‘jug-jug-jug’ in the distance, but I
couldn’t be sure.
At one time, the song of a
nightingale was so familiar to people
in the south-east as to be ubiquitous.
Now, as we continue along the broad
track, I wonder whether in 100 years