Issue 53 - The nightingale (and the horn)
MAY 2023
It started, in a woodland in Gloucester, thirty of us, blanket-clad, trying our earnest best to stand stock still, so that not even a rustle of a crisp packet jacket* would disturb the night’s star singer: the elusive male nightingale. It ended, since you ask, after an intense period of listening, with my boyfriend reaching across his van’s dashboard to retrieve his glasses and accidentally leaning on the van horn very, very loudly for what felt like 5 minutes.
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I'm not a nature writer, wildlife expert, or if I'm honest, even an especial bird enthusiast. But what I can tell you, is the bit preceding the horn was one hundred percent magical.
Around midnight, we had walked silently, in single file through the woods, and gathered around a solitary tree, some standing, others sitting in the dew, the light of the near full moon making it possible to see faces. The chosen spot of the famous bird was strangely near the car park, with all its reminders of the grind of the human everyday.
Two musicians accompanied our group, and they sang and played their instruments incredibly gently at first, gathering volume as the minutes past, and they entered into an extraordinary kind of collaboration with the tiny, unremarkable-looking bird. I was utterly convinced it was more than one nightingale, it was so rich, varied and beautiful, but afterwards our host, the singer Sam Lee, told us it was just a solitary male, seeking his mate.
Nightingales, he said, have an astonishingly rich repertoire, able to produce over 1000 different sounds, compared to about 100 by blackbirds (one the few birds I can recognise singing). Sam told us that humans are hard-wired to associate the bird’s sound with safety.
Very sadly the birds have declined by 90% in the UK in recent years, and it's likely that they will no longer exist here in 30 years. The idea of this is impossibly sad - that one day the male will sing his song for the last time, trying to tempt non-existent mates down from the sky. Sam told us we needed to eat more venison (deer clear the land the birds depend on) and support projects that safeguard our woodland in the UK.
Among the many famed creatives who have celebrated the bird in their works are Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Beethoven and Hans Christian Andersen. One of my favourite books of all time, The Darling Buds of May, is full of references.
There has been a rich history of playing music with them too, most famously, I googled, the duet with the cellist Beatrice Harrison, which was broadcast live on the BBC, and later turned out to have been faked by a bird mimic. (She did often play with a nightingale, but on the occasion of the live broadcast they had been scared away by the crew.)
A hundred years ago, Beatrice Harrison said that playing with nightingales “touched a chord’ with the British public, hitting a sweet spot of ‘‘their love of music, nature and loveliness”. I couldn’t agree more.
Book to hear a live duet yourself
Listen to Sam Lee and a nightingale here
(Huge thanks to my lovely brother Hamish for the tickets, and my lovely friend Emma for recommending we go. )
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IMAGE: from an original monoprint I made, illustrating the words from this song.
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