Page 11 - Natural World Summer 2017
P. 11
Nothing will prepare The morning
your ears for the sound symphony in
coming out of that beak your garden
Visit wildlifetrusts.org/birdsong to
hear our dawn chorus playlist
amy lewis
Blackbird
Blackbirds have the sweetest
voice. Mellow and tuneful, they
open the dawn chorus while it’s
still dark.
Brian David Stevens andy rouse
tingale Melissa Harrison Wren
is a wildlife writer
Wildlife Trust’s help, she struck gold and author of Rain: Next comes a metallic, frenetic,
Four Walks in high-pitched trilling and zipping.
English Weather. This little brown bird uses his huge
@M_Z_Harrison voice to proclaim his territory.
richard steel
people will go on pilgrimages to hear within by the birds’ liquid, amy lewis Chiffchaff
blackbirds or robins. I hope not. ventriloquial recital. When we move
on, I follow reluctantly; surely we Chiffchaffs join in a bit later, as the
We’re not half way to the visitor should stay and hear more? But I sun rises. They simply repeat their
centre when we begin to hear them: needn’t worry: this beautiful site name, two notes going up and
first one, then another, away among yields more, even closer and clearer, down, welcoming in the morning.
the trees. Even at a distance the for there are around 30 males here
sound is easy to distinguish from and more yet to arrive. At last, in a Song thrush
other birdsong, with an uncanny thicket by the mudflats of the wide
quality that no recording can River Colne, we find one only a few Loud and boisterous, the repeating
capture. “The best notes of other feet away, spilling out vivid, liquid tunes of the song thrush carry over
birds... come distinctly from the point phrases completely unconcerned the rest. They get faster and faster
where the bird utters them, and by us. until they’re barely pausing.
seem to reach and terminate at the
listener’s ear,” wrote Sir Edward Grey As dusk fell, female birds were
in 1927. “But the supreme notes of doubtless listening, assessing the
the nightingale envelop and parenting potential of competing
surround us: so that we lose males. But to me, the song’s meaning
perception of the point whence they was more ineffable: loaded with
proceed: it is as if we were included myth and legend, and a bittersweet
and embraced in pervading sound.” reminder of a wildlife-rich world we
must not let slip away.
Our faces are joy-struck, lit from
summer 2017 NATURAL WORLD 11
