A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  If there’s another time in the day that does approach dawn as a good time to listen to birdsong, it’s dusk. Many of the principles are the same – the birds are taking their last opportunity to send their aural CV out to prospective partners and rivals, before they settle down for the increasingly short night.

  Blackbirds and song thrushes are particularly fond of indulging in a little twilight serenade, with the former also prone to greeting the approaching darkness with their persistent ‘chink, chink’ alarm call. Other small birds, such as blue tits, also sing late. And others, such as the grasshopper warbler, take centre stage at the dimming of the day, pouring out their strange, mechanical ‘reeling’ song (like a bicycle freewheeling or a fishing reel being played out) just as everything else is falling silent.

  Other songs mainly heard at dusk and into the hours of darkness also tend to have similarly strange qualities – the vaguely mechanical ‘churring’ of nightjars, the corncrake’s call, a recitation of its scientific name of Crex crex which has been likened to running your fingernail along the teeth of a comb, or the eerie wailing of the goggle-eyed stone-curlew. Add the hooting and screeching of owls, and there’s still plenty to listen to once the sun has gone down.

  But there are out and out songsters who sing in the hours of darkness, birds that are the subject of one of the most persistent cases of mistaken identity in British birding, and one of them is in grave danger of disappearing from our islands altogether.

  I’ve never been described as a party animal, and New Year’s Eve is rarely a big deal for me, not least because, for many years, I’ve spent it preparing to get up early on New Year’s Day on a quest to see the year’s first birds. But a few years ago, I decided to celebrate with friends at a restaurant in Leicester, and after seeing in the New Year on the little dance floor (strictly eighties disco hits), I went outside for a breath of fresh air.

  As I stood amongst the smokers and taxi-seeking couples, at 2 a.m. on a freezing morning, I could hear the unmistakable sound of a robin singing. A quick scan around revealed the singer, perched in the top of a rowan tree in a nearby car park, carolling the revellers on their way home.

  Look up this phenomenon online and you’ll find plenty of suggestions that robins sing at night because street lights create an artificial daylight that triggers their song response, and their night-time singing is the result of increasing development and urbanisation. While this can’t be strictly true, as accounts of robins singing at night date back well into the nineteenth century, including in R.D. Blackmore’s 1869 novel Lorna Doone, there’s little doubt that the absence of genuine darkness in our towns and cities has had some effect and led to an increase in incidences, while another urban factor – noise – also seems to play a part. Robins, research suggests, have cottoned on to the fact that they’re far more likely to be heard in the hours of darkness, when towns and cities are quieter.

  Widespread and well-documented as this habit is, it’s not common knowledge, which means the casual, non-birding listener tends to identify these nocturnal singers as the one species that everyone knows sings at night; a species that is, indeed, defined by it – the nightingale.

  The name ‘nightingale’ is Anglo-Saxon in origin and means ‘night songstress’, as it was assumed the female did the singing, although it’s the male – specifically, the unpaired male – that does so. The nightingale’s endlessly inventive mixture of whistles, trills and gurgles is both astonishingly pure and extremely loud; in Spain, where the birds are widespread and numerous, their name is ‘ruisenor’ – literally, ‘the noisy man’. The volume is required because these lovesick bachelors are, initially at least, trying to attract passing females who are flying over their territory on migration, and later to gain the attention of those unpaired females scattered around the countryside.

  Let’s return to our city-based, night-time serenaders. The nightingale is not given to frequenting urban environments. It might, conceivably, find something to its liking in one of the larger, wilder city parks, such as London’s Hampstead Heath – but as for the small, manicured rectangles of greenery that punctuate our cities and towns, the roundabouts and verges and central reservations of our ring roads, and the gardens of our homes? Forget about it.

  This fact was acknowledged by Eric Maschwitz and Manning Sherwin, writers of the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, a great favourite during the Second World War. The song’s whole point, of course, is that the singer is willing to believe all manner of unlikely things could have happened on the magical evening he met his beloved: a nightingale singing in London’s West End is every bit as implausible, the song suggests, as angels dining at The Ritz.

  The war also, incidentally, provided a remarkable example of the power of birdsong to transcend even the most trying of circumstances. Since 1924, the BBC had been broadcasting, and selling recordings of, the renowned cellist Beatrice Harrison as she played her cello in her garden in Oxted, Surrey to the accompaniment of the nightingales singing there.

  In 1942, the broadcast was going ahead as usual, when the microphones started to pick up the drone of approaching aircraft: RAF bombers on the way to attack Mannheim in Germany. As the menacing noise grew louder, so too did the singing of the birds, determined to be heard no matter what. Concerned that any Germans listening in might get warning of the coming raid, a sound engineer abruptly pulled the plug, and radios fell silent across Britain.

  To hear the recording now is extraordinary; the nightingales are both a reminder that life – the life of the natural world – carried on as usual despite the tragedies engulfing Europe, as well as being a symbol, perhaps, of the idealised Britain that was being fought for. It’s difficult to listen to it without choking back a tear. But birdsong of all sorts can have that effect. Somehow, rather like poetry, it slips past the brain’s rational gatekeeper, and attaches itself directly to the emotional core instead.

  On a cool evening later in April, I’m at the Knepp Castle Estate, in the West Sussex Weald, where a rather extraordinary rewilding programme is offering new hope that the nightingale won’t fall silent in the UK altogether.

  The purity and volume of the nightingale’s song are partly due to the fact that the sound needs to carry as far as possible in the nightingale’s very specialised habitat – coppiced woodland of a particular age, and scrubby thicket of a particular structure, in which they sing from the most impenetrable parts. The lack of such a habitat is one of the reasons why the nightingale has struggled to thrive in Britain in recent years, with only an estimated 6,500 males present each spring and summer, down from perhaps half as many again in the mid-1990s; moreover, the bird is also near the northern edge of its range in West Sussex, with most nightingales confined to the south-east of Britain and East Anglia.

  Global warming could play a part in reversing recent declines and extend that range northwards; but in the meantime there are success stories. Paxton Pits, a nature reserve next to a working gravel quarry in Cambridgeshire, is a renowned hotspot, and other old gravel pits are similarly attractive to the birds, because once these areas have been returned to nature they develop at a certain point into exactly the habitat that the nightingales are looking for.

  Significantly, both of the nightingale’s preferred habitats are very transient. As coppiced trees age they shade out the plants beneath them, leaving the ground-layer too open for nightingales; and a similar thing happens with scrubland. Without the right kind of management to maintain them these habitats disappear – and so do the nightingales.

  At Knepp there’s an ambitious attempt to use large herbivores to drive landscape changes, with cows, deer, horses and pigs helping to create a mosaic of habitats, including open grassland, regenerating scrub, bare ground and forested groves. Nevertheless, even here there’s a recognition that the nightingales will come and go – areas that are good for them one year will eventually be good for other species, while the nightingales will move on in search of their very specific ne
eds. There’s a requirement, then, across the country, for new sites to be constantly provided.

  Despite their name nightingales do also sing during the day, and on our initial tour of the estate, a good hour-and-a-half before sunset, we catch a couple of snatches of song – remarkably far-carrying on the still air. I begin to understand why this bird has haunted the imaginations of tortured artists and poets for centuries: there’s a truly musical beauty to the song, but there’s also the resonance added by the apparent hopelessness of their quest (just how likely is a female to be passing?), and the knowledge that any particular nightingale we hear might be gone next year, to another site that meets its very precise requirements.

  There’s also the sense of time and place that the bird’s singing evokes. To hear a nightingale song is to be instantly transported to an evening-time English woodland between mid-April and early June, with all its smells and sounds and sights. Damp earth, and wild garlic, and the new leaves rustling and, here and there, holding on to little pockets of the heat of the day. Bluebells, of course, impossibly, violently violet, pooling around your feet as though the sky has seeped down through the canopy.

  It’s that way with all birdsong, and perhaps it’s one of the reasons why it, and so much of birdwatching generally, can be best appreciated alone. It awakens the poet and artist in all of us, and permits, no – compels, us to take a look inside ourselves.

  To hear the nightingale singing in the depths of the night is what really sends a chill down the spine. It’s this experience, surely, that has made it such an iconic bird in Western literature and music.

  Homer was the first to mention it, in The Odyssey, in connection with the myth of Philomela and Procne (Philomel was later used as an alternative name for the bird); and both the Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles and the Roman poet Ovid also wrote their own takes on the myth, in which one of the pair (versions vary) is turned into a nightingale – for that reason, the song was interpreted as a lament, although it’s far from the most melancholy of bird songs.

  Later poets, from Chaucer – in a poem called ‘The Cuckoo and the Nightingale’, which acts as a prelude to his longer work The Parliament of Fowls – right down to T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, used the same story, while others, including Shakespeare, have tended to use the bird as a symbol of themselves and their own art, with the Bard writing in Sonnet 102:

  Our love was new, and then but in the spring,

  When I was wont to greet it with my lays;

  As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,

  And stops his pipe in growth of riper days …

  By the early nineteenth century, when the Romantic movement was in full swing, the nightingale was again being co-opted by men with time, pens and paper on their hands, representing nothing less than the voice of nature itself. Shelley, in his ‘A Defence of Poetry’, wrote:

  A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

  Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ similarly portrays the bird as the poet himself would have liked to have been perceived – as the creator of a deathless music that lives on long after him. However, at least one of Keats’s contemporaries might have wondered if the bird that inspired the writing of the poem (in Hampstead) was really a nightingale at all. Even if it was, he’d certainly have objected to the way Keats used it largely symbolically, emphasising the effect of its song on him.

  That man, John Clare, was the son of a farm labourer from Helpston, Northamptonshire. Almost entirely self-taught, he pursued a number of menial occupations, but also wrote poetry from an early age. After being published by the same company that published Keats, he was for a time a literary sensation. Clare’s main subject was the natural world, and the threats he saw being posed to it, especially by the enclosure of common land. Feeling alienated both from literary society and the agricultural workers he’d grown up with, he spent long hours wandering the countryside around his home, and writing about the wildlife he found there, which he described with the skill of one who knew it well. During the last fifty years, his reputation has gradually grown again, with his factual, first-hand and utterly unsentimental approach apparent in the work of poets such as Ted Hughes, as well as in the writings of many nature writers.

  It’s still possible to hear nightingales singing in good numbers at Castor Hanglands, a nature reserve within sight of the spire of Helpston Church, so perhaps not surprisingly they cropped up again and again in Clare’s writing. In ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’ for example, he writes:

  Of summer’s fame she shared, for so to me

  Did happy fancies shapen her employ:

  But if I touched a bush, or scarcely stirred,

  All in a moment stopt. I watched in vain:

  The timid bird had left the hazel bush,

  And at a distance hid to sing again.

  I find myself thinking of these lines at Knepp. After a lull at sunset and the first ninety minutes or so of darkness the nightingales have started up again, always seemingly just beyond the next hedge, or just over the next rise, always leading us further into the night.

  Nevertheless, it’s exhilarating to stand there in the dark, ears straining for the next sound. Occasionally there’s the distant hooting of tawny owls, and once the screeching of a barn owl, but otherwise the silence is all the deeper for the confidence and élan with which it’s shattered every now and then by the nightingales, just as every note of their songs (and the number they pack into each one is astonishing) is thrown into sharper relief by the stillness that surrounds them. The nightingale, like all the best musicians, knows that what you leave out is just as important as what you put in.

  I wait until the cold and a pressing appointment first thing in the morning have grown too much to ignore, then head home in the knowledge that the nightingales will be singing right through until dawn. Indeed, dawn and dusk chorus are alike to them – and so is everything in between. They’re not, if I’m honest, my favourite British songster – the humble blackbird would win that accolade – but I defy anyone to hear just one nightingale and not feel that they’ve been touched, for a moment, by the poetry of nature.

  3 Out of Africa

  It’s a bitterly cold Sunday at the end of March, and I’m about to indulge in one of my rare bouts of twitching. A lesser scaup, a North American duck, has somehow been blown right across the Atlantic and come to rest in the middle of Leicestershire. I often feel rather uneasy about going to see such ‘vagrants’, because in the case of many species, especially songbirds, they’re never going to be able to make the trip back to their natural homes, but it’s different for ducks, which can always take a break any time they feel like it as they cross the ocean. And, anyway, lesser scaups are part of a family very much given to hybridisation – ‘love the one you’re with’ might be their motto – so even if this bird stays here, it isn’t necessarily going to be condemned to a lonely, companionless existence before being singled out for the attentions of a peregrine or some other predator with an eye for a stranger. Conscience well and truly squared, I make the short drive from home to Swithland Reservoir, a dozen miles away on the edge of the Soar Valley.

  It’s a site I visit a lot anyway. Always have, in fact. When I was a child, we’d occasionally stop here on the way back from shopping trips to Leicester, to stand and watch and feed the ducks that gather where the road goes across a little causeway. I don’t recall any particular sightings from those days, but in its own small way it must have helped nurture the seeds of my love of birds. When, in the late nineties and early noughties, I returned to birdwatching in earnest, the reservoir became a regular haunt. By then, I’d discovered the lane that led round the larger section of the water, previously hidden beyond a wooded island and a bridge carrying the Great Central Railway’s steam trains. You could follow the lane all the
way onto the dam, then get good views across the whole expanse of water.

  In winter, the water would be thronged with great crested grebes, coots, and ducks such as goldeneye, the pied, posturing males warming up for the breeding season by practising their displays, which involve throwing their heads back as if in silent laughter. In summer, common terns nested on an artificial raft and fished in the filter pools behind the dam, passing just a few feet overhead on their journeys to and fro, while clouds of swallows, martins and swifts hoovered up the mass of insect life swarming over the water. At all times, peregrines and ravens were a possibility. And, even if nothing avian appeared, it was somewhere to go where you could reasonably expect to see no one other than the odd birder, walker, cyclist, or fisherman. In the crowded East Midlands, little oases of calm like that can be hard to come by.

  Today is different. That much is obvious from well down the lane, and, as I turn the last corner onto the dam, I can see that, if I am quick, I might just grab the last parking space. The space is tucked immediately behind the old Victorian pumping-house that juts out into the water, and which puts paid to any plans for doing my birding from within a warm car – but beggars can’t be choosers.

  Inadequately wrapped up against the cold – optimism has triumphed over experience – I set up my scope at a good viewing spot, and start scanning. Very quickly, about two hundred yards away on the water, I come across the lesser scaup, and for a minute or two admire its neat black and white plumage and the way its glossy head appears alternately dark green and dark purple as it turns in the sunlight. The wonders of Austrian optical technology even help pick out the dark vermiculations – thin, wavy stripes – on the white back and wings.