Singing with Nightingales at Strawberry Hill Farm
I found Singing with Nightingales at Highnam Woods in Gloucestershire last year deeply moving. I enthused about that experience to my niece, artist Sarah Gillespie, so she proposed we book ahead for this year at the new venue, Strawberry Hill Farm in Bedfordshire.
After an early evening walk listening to the bird chorus, and delicious food around the fires, Sam Lee introduce Yazz Ahmed, the musician working with him that evening, who offered us a few notes on her fugelhorn. He told us something of the natural history of Nightingales, in particular the tragedy of the precipitous fall in numbers. Finally, once it was nearly dark, he gathered us around to prepare for our night walk into the woods.
‘How does a wolf pack travel?’, Sam asked us. ‘Slowest first’, was the correct answer, so with my knees creaking I gratefully moved toward the front of the line, and we started off through the gloom of the early summer night. As we followed the grassy track between blackthorn bushes and young woodland, I could just about make out the loom of the person ahead of me – no lights of any kind were allowed. We paused at one or two places while Sam went ahead to reconnoitre, until we settled in a small clearing, most people sitting on the ground – which was dry after months with no rain.
The night was still and very cold. The sky completely clear, deep blue rather than black, stars shining through. The bushes enclosed us, a tangle of branches starkly silhouetted against the blue. A complete silence fell amongst us, not a sigh or a cough, not a rustle of clothes, as we listened to what we had come to hear.
To my left, very close, quite low down, one Nightingale was singing, loud and clear, pouring out that characteristic combination of melody and clicks. This is a song so well known about, but so little heard by modern ears. Then he – for it is the male who sings – paused and a reply to rang out from a second bird high up and to my right; a third, directly opposite, joined in; a fourth, more distant; and beyond, yet more distant, faint hints of even more song.
We sat there, marinated in the sounds, absorbing the rich flavours of this singing, surprising ourselves with our stillness. Sam – who has listened to many more nightingales that have I, describes the Nightingale as ‘an eloquent, feathered, lyrical conversant’, and reaches vainly for words to describe the song, noting that the next day he might chose quite different adjectives:
Mercurial, spacious, gymnastic, brazen, exuberant, melancholic, boastful, piquant, intimate, tender, reticent, garrulous, generous, vulnerable, queer, wistful, wanton, lascivious, brittle, aquiline, digital, pleated, poignant, elegiac, flamboyant, histrionic and wounded.1
After we had sat and listened a little while, Sam started a low drone and a song. Then Yazz played her flugelhorn, music with such extraordinary delicacy that it seemed one could feel her embouchure toying with the mouthpiece to create the musical response she desired. With my eyes closed, I was drawn into an even more complex soundscape, my attention sometimes flitting between horn, song, and birds; at other times absorbed in the whole.
Sam writes that ‘humans have sung with nightingales for millennia’ and that among the musicians that come to play with nightingales, ‘With those who have a brightness in their eyes and a deep connection they can channel in their music, the Nightingale hears them instantly and responds’.2 Of course, the male birds are singing to call down a mate to their chosen thicket – although this late in the season it is likely that all the females are mated and we were listening to frustrated bachelors – but it is a mistake of the reductive mind hear this wonderful song to simply a reproductive urge.
That night at Strawberry Hill Farm, while I did on occasion hear call and response between humans and birds, more often I was simply enveloped in a sensuous landscape: sky and stars, shadowy bushes, clear cold air, birdsong, my own listening body, and this temporary community of humans, all drawn together to form an indivisible celebration of life. And I understood again that the point of it all is not just to understand but to encounter the world as fully and as deeply as one can and to rejoice in that experience.
With Nightingales, this encounter is filled with tragedy. Not so long ago, even in the 1950s, multitudes flew from East Africa each year to sing and mate in the woods of southern England. Each year the newly hatched birds flew back to Africa and returned to the same woods, maybe the same thicket, to mate and raise their young. Today there are a scant five thousand in England, numbers reduced mainly through loss of habitat due to modern farming practices. Sam sings of and to Nightingale in his version of the folk song Bushes and Briars:
‘Sometimes I’m uneasy
And troubled in my mind
Sometimes I think we’ve gone too far
To turn it round in time…’3
And continues in the song to tell us that when we hear the Nightingale song, we are hearing their requiem. With similar feeling, Sarah titles her mezzoprint of Nightingale ‘A Thousand Goodbyes’.
The cynic might ask, what do you think you are up to, going into the woodland with your noise and your human smells, blowing horns, disturbing the birds that you say you care about? Do you really think they are bothered what kind of noise you make? It’s a question that invites reflection on the place of we humans in the communion of life on Earth. For it has become commonplace to regard us as either dominating the planet and re-creating it for our own purposes; or as a destructive virus or cancer. Wilderness is sometimes defined as a place untouched by human intervention; Indigenous people are sometimes moved off the land that has been their home to create a ‘reserve’ for wildlife. But more careful understanding will see that in many places – in Australia, in the Amazon, in the North American woodlands – Indigenous people worked with the Land, often with fire, to mutually enhance ecological richness.4 Indeed, the traditional English landscape, before hedges were ripped out to make huge fields suitable for machinery, was an ‘interlacing of natural and cultural, the centuries-long pattern of pasture, wood, meadow, garden, house and rough grounds’,5 a rich habitat for all kinds of birds.
Thomas Berry tells us
… the human came into existence at the advanced stage of the Cenozoic period. To bear the burden and responsibility of human intelligence, we needed a magnificent world of beauty in order to give us the healing that we would need. The greatest, deepest tragedy of losing the splendour of the outer world is that we will always have an inner demand for which genetically coded to exist in the world of Beauty.6
I think we experienced something of both the splendour and the tragedy as we listened to Nightingale and human music that night. And as Australian Aboriginal people put it, without humans, the Land (and the birds) might feel lonely.7 The nature of the attention that we bring to bear on the world, and the values which we bring to the encounter, change what we find.8
So I venture to suggest that the Nightingale needs to be heard almost as much as we need to listen.
Sam Lee. (2021). The Nightingale: Notes on a songbird. Century, p.151
Ibid, p. 73.
Bushes and Briars, in Sam Lee Songdreaming.
Bawaka Country. (2023). Keepers of the flame: songspirals are a university for us. Australian Journal of Environmental Education 39 (Special Issue 3: Indigenous Philosophy in Environmental Education: Relearning How to Love, Feel, Hear, and Live with Place). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2023.27
Adam Nicolson. (2025). Bird School: A beginner in the wood. William Collins, p.314
Thomas Berry. (2002). The Great Story. Produced by N. Stetson & P. Morell; Bullfrog Films.
Bessarab, D. (2010). Country is lonely. In S. Morgan, T. Mia, & B. Kwaymullina (Eds.), Heartsick for country: stories of love, spirit and creation (pp. 44-58). Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Iain McGilchrist. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Vol. I & II). London: Perspectiva, p.85.
Wonderful description. I could almost think I was there too!
Years ago I spent a night listening (from my bedroom!) to nightingales in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Needless to say, it was an unforgettable experience.