Ingham’s W RLD
WE HAD come from far and wide and entered nature’s green cathedral like pilgrims – in ones and twos, quietly, reverentially, waiting for the shrine to come to life. We didn’t speak and as dusk fell in the woods we went our separate ways to listen intently, taut with anticipation.
And at last, with midges flitting around my head, an explosion of song brought a threeyear-old wild goose chase to a happy ending.
Well, a wild nightingale chase to be precise. For the past three springs I have ranged in vain over the commons and woods of the South-east in search of one of our most charismatic and rapidly vanishing birds.
Amid the murky hedgerows, darkening woods and purpling bluebells of the RSPB’s Pulborough Brooks reserve in Sussex, I at last met the muse of poets, from Sappho to Shelley, Shakespeare to Keats. It was worth it.
A male nightingale in full flow is a maestro. He mixes croaks, whistles, trills, rich notes and deepthroated pounding in an unstoppable display of virtuosity. This one was deafening but, hard as I looked, he remained invisible in the bushes just 5ft away.
In the background a song thrush tried to compete. He has a lovely, powerful song, repeating each phrase three or four times. He’s the bird most likely to wake you up around dawn. But compared with the nightingale he is a plodder, a child playing chopsticks beside a concert pianist.
To us birdsong is a thing of beauty, an expression of joy. But Dominic Couzens, in his fascinating new book, says these songs are a form of warfare.
The males are singing to defend territories, woo mates and ward off rivals. The more a male sings, the more attractive he is. It shows he’s fit and has a good territory. If food is easy to find, he has more time to sing. If his song is strong and varied – and nightingales have the pick of 250 phrases – he becomes a love god.
Sex is the driver. When the male nightingale finds a mate, he usually stops singing.
Of course I never saw this randy songster in his scrubby fortress but I had not made a 90-mile round-trip to see these drab little birds. Their music is all.
So I left him to sing and entertain my fellow worshippers in the wood’s nave-like acoustics, thrilled that I had once again heard the bird that Sappho called “the angel of spring, the mellow-throated nightingale”. It was well worth a pilgrimage.
Google “nightingale” and “RSPB” to hear its song. Do read Songs Of Love And War by Dominic Couzens, Bloomsbury, £16.99. BRITAIN’S declining hares could be helped by… elephant grass. The giant Asian grass is grown here to be burned for renewable energy and hares love it, says a study by the Open, Cambridge and Hull Universities. It provides perfect shelter, letting them feed around the edges, reports the European Journal of Wildlife Research. LAST summer I sailed past the world’s biggest gannetry – Bass Rock – in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, admiring the white and gold gannets against a black sky. Sadly this bird colony is strewn with plastic. A Greenpeace expedition this week found it littered with plastic bags, packaging, old fishing gear and crisp packets. Our throwaway society has a long reach. GREEN TIP: Find where you can recycle furniture from chairs to beds through the Furniture Re-use Network – www.frn.org.uk HERE the return of beavers has sparked fears that they will cause flooding. In America they are being reintroduced because their dams reduce flooding by storing water upstream, says the Wildlife Conservation Society. Nature often knows best. BIRDS at a Canadian airport are in for a shock: the Terminator is coming. Edmonton airport will shortly reduce the risk of bird strikes bringing down planes by unleashing Robird. Invented by Holland’s University of Twente, it looks like a peregrine, flies like a peregrine and frightens birds like a peregrine. But what’s wrong with a real peregrine?