Tomorrow is International Dawn Chorus Day. Read Chris Baines’s guest blog about how this all started.
Sunrise is about 5:20am but it gets light before then and birds start singing before it gets light. But the forecast is fine so I’ll set the alarm for 4:30am and step outside for half an hour or so.
The dawn chorus will be there tomorrow, and the next day, and the next – but it will be getting progressively earlier for the next few weeks remember! But there is something about doing something at the same time as lots of other people – even if you aren’t doing it with them.
So, providing I make the early hour I’ll be listening to Blackbirds, Robins, a distant Song Thrush and who knows what else, but I’ll also be thinking that there are others doing just the same, dotted around the UK, but also across the world.
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Was pretty good this morning. Our first songster is always one of th emale Blackbirds. Started abotu 4.45, I reckon, and I wa soutdoors listening by 5.05… its our second lock-down Cambs listing day, with a 5am start………and I had 9 species in the chorus until 5.40, by when it was really subsiding again. I will be out tomorrow just enjoying the dawn chorus.
All good stuff, Mark and Chris, and it’s perhaps worth sparing a thought for the man credited with introducing the term, “dawn chorus” – Sir Edward Grey (who, incidentally, was Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of the 1914-18 war).
A passionate ornithologist all his life, he became particularly expert on the songs of different species after rapidly failing eyesight meant he could no longer see birds.
This was a man who once prided himself on being able to detect the droppings of a treecreeper sprinkled at the bottom of a tree!
Birdsong provided compensation for other tragedies in his life.
His two beloved wives both predeceased him, and he lost two of his four brothers in the most bizarre of circumstances – one savaged by a lion and the other trampled by a buffalo.
As if this were not enough, his home, Fallodon Hall in Northumberland, was destroyed in a fire.
In his last days, he would take breakfast in bed, simultaneously feeding the squirrels that came down the chimney. He couldn’t see the soot they were leaving all over his sheets and blankets!
Which is the star of the dawn chorus? In his classic book, The Charm of Birds (1927), Grey writes: “It is the blackbird which gives tone and spirit to the whole.
“A dozen or more different species are taking part, but is the notes of the blackbird that the chorus could least spare”.