Singing with Nightingales

Highnam Woods

Singing with Nightingales

Highnam Wood, Gloucestershire

We stood in silence, huddled together, waiting for Nightingale to sing. We knew he was somewhere in the thicket of blackthorn and bramble, close to where we were standing. The moon, just past full and shining directly on us through a clearing in the trees, lit up each human face, each expression of quiet patience and eager anticipation. Sticky mud underfoot, chilly in the April night, we waited. No sound from the bird, but still we waited, patient, silent, scarcely moving. Then Josh drew some plaintive notes from his Kora and Sam sang words that called to Nightingale.  And from the tangled undergrowth Nightingale sang, first a few clicks and twitters, then the enchanting song, tumbling phrases, repetitions, variations, at least in part in response to the human music. Then silence again, more music from the humans, and more from the bird.

Earlier that evening I had driven to Highnam Woods in Gloucestershire, struggling through the congestion of rush hour traffic around Bristol – it was one of those days when there was a hold-up on the motorway – aware how bizarre it was to be participating in one of the modern world’s most destructive activities while on my way to listen to rare birdsong. But having parked my car, I was drawn into the quiet of the woods, walking paths surrounded by the evening chorus: Wren, Robin, Blackbird, Blackcap, Woodpecker… The campsite where we were to gather had been made ready with temporary shelters, a circle of benches, hot drinks ready, and food preparing on the barbeque. Gradually we assembled, some thirty people eager to hear Nightingale sing.

Sam – Sam Lee, the renowned folk singer and song collector who set up Singing with Nightingales with The Nest Collective several years ago – welcomed us with a few words, then took us on a short walk through the woods. We stopped in a clearing to appreciate the evening sounds and learn more about the woods and birds. By the time we arrived back at the camp, a delicious tagine was ready, which we ate standing round two fire bowls, chatting, getting to know a little of our human companions. Food consumed and appreciated, we sat in a circle listening to songs from Sam and Kora music from Josh, and to hear about the life cycle of the Nightingale. Sam told us how the males would arrive each spring from East Africa, find a nest site in a protected thicket, and sing through the night to attract a female – the stronger the song, the more attractive was the male.[i]

By the time we set off from the campsite, all these activities – walking together through the evening woods, listening to birds, good food, and wonderful music – had drawn us into a loose community holding the shared purpose and discipline of stepping quietly through the woods to encounter the Nightingale’s song. And we set off in silence, single file through the darkness, although the rising moon was already lighting the sky and reflecting from the scattering of cumulus clouds.

It was a night of terrible beauty.  For as Sam had told us, this is the lone male Nightingale in these woods. He is singing to call down a mate from the sky to the patch of thicket he has chosen, a mate that had, like him, flown all the way from Senegal. That mate might well never arrive. When Sam first started singing with Nightingales in these woods there were six males calling for mates. This year there is just one. Not statistically significant maybe, but certainly a straw in the wind.  A little while ago, even in the 1950s, multitudes of Nightingales flew from East Africa each year to sing and mate in the woods of southern England. Each year the newly hatched birds fly to Africa – how do they find their way? – and return to the same woods, maybe the same thicket, to mate and raise their young. Today there are a scant five thousand.

Born a city dweller, I have known ‘about’ nightingales and their liquid song all my life. I was familiar with John Keats’, Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! – today we recognise the unintentional irony; later I learned John Clare’s far more grounded poem Up this green woodland-ride let's softly rove,  | And list the Nightingale – she dwells just here. Yet in my mind Nightingale was an almost mythical creature, only slightly more real than Unicorn, existing firmly in English literature and mythology, but outside my experience

But this night we encountered a living bird in the ecological niche he had evolved to inhabit, a niche that is being degraded fast, that will soon no longer support his kind. Standing in the woods on that cold April night we were drawn to the edge of the extinction precipice that is devastating the more-than-human world, made manifest with this patch of wood and this lone Nightingale. We stood in the woods witnessing what was quite possibly the last Nightingale to sing in these woods, even one of the final gestures of a form of life on Earth. This is not a simple loss, it is a part the disruption of the process of life itself, a permanent loss of evolutionary complexity, a permanent ending of a pattern of being.

It was the beauty of Nightingale’s song, that exquisite sound directed at a mate that maybe wasn’t even there, that directly confronted us with this dreadful loss. As Sam sings in Bushes and Briars.[ii]

Your speak is filled with woe betide
Yet singularly sublime
A language, a liturgy, alive yet saturnine
For your rarity determines mine
Such times we find we're in the presence of
A reckoning divine

This experience of that evening in the woods speaks for itself. It is also relevant to the central theme of Learning how Land Speaks, living cosmos panpsychism, and an understanding of the world as a community of subjects. Singing with Nightingales – the respectful practice established over the years; the temporary community of humans; our silent, anticipatory presence; the songs and music – taken together can be seen as an invocation, a calling forth of a renewed relationship between Nightingales and humans. Nightingale would be singing anyway for his own purposes. But that night, he also communicated a visceral sense of the tragedy of extinction to a small group of human persons, and so gives us a vivid narrative through which we can convey some of the experience of that tragedy to our fellows.

---

[i] Lee, Sam. The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird. London: Century, 2021. My Review at Shiny New Books

[ii] Bushes and Briars is on the album Song Dreaming by Sam Lee, available from Bandcamp.