This evening Brian Reid, Rolf Williams and I will be at Northward Hill RSPB Reserve with a lot of kit, hopefully a singing nightingale and all our fingers crossed as we try to live stream the song of nightingale to this web page. We’ll kick off around 8 o’clock and keep going through the evening depending on the will of the nightingale!
There are three reasons we are trying to do this:
For joy – just as 90 years ago when the BBC broadcast nightingales to the accompaniment of Miss Beatrice Harrison on her cello and 50,000 people wrote in with their thanks and praise for the event – hearing nightingales in an English spring is an experience more people should enjoy.
In expectation - that sense will prevail and plans to build 5000 houses on the best site for nightingales at Lodge Hill – just down the road from our location tonight. Here’s more on that case and how you can help.
And in hope – that against considerable odds international cooperation , the best science and renewed effort will turn round the fortunes of our long-distance migrants. As a group of birds their populations are under a variety of serious pressures – including land-use here in the UK and in Africa and the annual gauntlet of slaughter they face around the Mediterranean. For these are birds without borders and alone we can not do enough for them.
And against all the odds this morning in Kent I’ve been watching spotted flycatchers and turtle doves in the place I grew up – still here, still revelling in the spring sunshine but now so much rarer than back in the 1960s when I first got to know them – and when nightingales sang in the trees at the edge of the garden and the coppiced woodlands nearby.
Not the greatest picture of a turtle dove ever - but my picture taken less than an hour before posting this blog. From Africa with hope and a lot of luck!
So they are some of the reasons I agreed (rather rashly) to the challenge of Chris Rose (and do sign this petition please) and our conservation director, Martin Harper, to try to get live nightingales out there on the world wide web.
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