Chris Packham has done a heroic job in supporting Birdlife Malta and raising the profile of the massacre that migrants face in Malta. I want to keep a profile on our magnificent migrants and so today, Chris Rose (campaign guru and co-founder of the Fairyland Trust) celebrates the song of one of our best loved migrants, the nightingale.
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Wouldn't it improve our quality of life, if every man, woman and child in the UK could hear at least one nightingale sing, every spring? If you agree, please sign my petition asking the BBC to broadcast nightingale song live, on May 18th here.
Perhaps Lord Reith, famous first leader of the BBC thought so, for on May 18th 1924, a singing nightingale in a Surrey wood (with a famous cellist playing along) was the centerpiece of the BBC’s first ever ‘Outside Broadcast’. It was by wireless of course, and as any birdwatcher knows, there is little point in trying to see a nightingale but every point in making the effort to hear one.
An estimated one million people tuned in to that first ‘OB’. The BBC and the cellist, Beatrice Harrison, were deluged with 50,000 letters of appreciation. So popular was the nightingale broadcast that thousands of people joined organised trips to the Surrey woods to hear the birds, and the BBC repeated the broadcast each May, until it was stopped in mid-broadcast in 1942, during the Second World War. The sound of that wartime bird, recorded but never trasnmitted, has the noise of RAF bombers gathering overhead, in the background. It is one of the spookiest, most evocative things I have ever heard – listen here.
When May approaches, my thoughts always turn to making the trip to my nearest reliable singing nightingales at Salthouse Heath in Norfolk but there do seem to be fewer than when I lived there a decade or so ago. If true, that is not surprising: the BTO found that nightingales declined by over 50% between 1995 and 2008, and there are reasons to think they are in deep trouble. Muntjac deer are munching through the thick undergrowth they favour, and like many other migrants which spend much of the year in Africa, their habitat is threatened by climate change, and wholesale land use change for agriculture. In this country, even the Lodge Hill nightingale stronghold in Kent is threatened by house building, while most all insect-eating birds are in decline, probably because of the pervasive and insidious effects of widespread pollution from neonicotinoids and other agri-poisons.
So I think it is high time that the BBC, the great informer and relayer of British national passions and culture, re-instated the nightingale tradition, with another OB this May 18th. If the BBC has trouble finding a singing nightingale in these depleted times, I feel sure that readers of this blog, if not the RSPB itself, will be up to the task of locating one, or several.
Nightingales are not the harbingers of spring but the soul of spring, with us like swifts, for only a few months before departing from our shores but from not our hearts. With the right conservation efforts, our landscape could once again be made much more nightingale-friendly and the lives of our children and theirs could be enriched by their song.
As David Attenborough said, “No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”. A recording is not the same as the real thing, any more than a stuffed Dodo or Great Auk is a real bird. But hearing a real nightingale live is a step closer to experiencing the magic, and who knows, perhaps the RSPB or others could organise gatherings for those who wanted to get closer to authentic nature, to quietly stand and listen to nightingales, just as our great grandparents did in the 1920s and 1930s. If you want to encourage the BBC, contact anyone in the organisation that you know, or if you don’t know anyone, ask your local radio station or tv programme to set up a broadcast – the contacts are at www.bbc.co.uk.
You can read more about the nightingale broadcast here and sign the petition here.
Thank you
Chris Rose chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk
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I shall give you an update on Chris' petition and challenge to the RSPB next week.
hi Martin, I've been reading your blog with interest - and also had a particular interest in Beatrice Harrison and the nightingales for some time and really enjoyed this year's broadcast. For some time I've been planning and making an art installation in homage to Beatrice and the Nightingales, and this will come to fruition very soon for a festival in Chatham called TöNE. I'm here now preparing and will go out to find see if i can still hear some local nightingales. I'm interested to hear more about the Lodge Hill case - could you perhaps get in touch with me on kathy@kathyhinde.co.uk ? or put me in touch with someone who is available at the moment around this case? thanks very much.
What is happening in Malta is appalling and we should all be doing everything we could to save the wonderful birds that are being killed. But we surely do need to ask what sort of a welcome we are providing in the UK. RSPB has worked tirelessly to highlight the problems facing farmland birds but the plight of the Nightingale gets a much lower profile - and is probably much easier to solve. RSPB's own science shows that lack of woodland management is the species' biggest problem in England and to anyone who understands Nightingale and woodland ecology it is completely and simply obvious: the thicket Nightingales love disappears as trees close canopy and shade out the understory, along with bluebells and butterflies. There is a pernicious idea within conservation that doing nothing in woods is right - don't disturb them - and it is playing its part in wiping out Nightingale breeding habitat. Not, I'm glad to say, the RSPB whose management of reserves like Church Wood Blean and Highnham in Gloucstershire is exemplary - but we have 500,000 has of unmanaged woodland, much of it ancient, much in conservation management that is untouched, dark and of no use at all to Nightingales. We need to make more habitat here just as badly as we must stop the slaughter on migration.
Don't tell anyone, but the wren does it for me...
Martin, Oddly I prefer the song of the Blackbird to that of the nightingale. Despite that I look forward to the Nightingale every year as the Cotswold Water Park holds quite a reasonable number (20 singing males in 2012 - Hint: needs a good RSPB reserve). It is always a surprise to those passing by when you can point out a nightingale singing during the day.
I really can't believe that Lodge Hill is still rumbling on. Developers do seem to think that money and high powered legal support will get them what they want eventually. The problem is they are mostly proved right.