Over the next two years the RSPB hopes that its Let Nature Sing campaign will bring the music of the wild back into our lives, to remind people of the sounds we love from nature and how we would miss them if they were gone. I’m already missing them quite a lot.
RSPB has joined forces with award-winning singer and musician Sam Lee, and Bill Barclay, musical director at the Globe Theatre, to produce the first track of pure birdsong – including of declining species such as Cuckoo, Curlew, Nightingale and Turtle Dove – to be released into the UK singles charts.
These four species are good choices for those of us who live in Northamptonshire – Curlew still nest here, but rarely, and I’m going to spend some time this spring tracking them down, Turtle Dove are so much rarer than even a decade ago, Cuckoo are greatly diminished and Nightingales were absent from several usual haunts last year. It will take a lot of effort to hear all four of them singing this year in my adopted county.
The single will be available to pre-order from today and on general release from 26 April at www.rspb.org.uk/letnaturesing. It would be great if this single tops the charts on International Dawn Chorus Day on 5 May.
Any profits will be reinvested in nature reserves.
This strikes me as a very good idea. It uses bird song, it might get those songs and the stories behind them to a new audience. I’ll be ordering my single and I have already spent some time listening to songs from one of my favourite RSPB nature reserves, the Dinas, on the RSPB Chorus Hub.
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Birds listed in alphabetical order, NOT recording order, on CD cover making it difficult to identify the birds with their songs..